This book is an outcome of my long-standing interest in Indian literature and modernity studies, areas that have engaged my focused attention particularly over the past two decades. Its origin is as a collection of independent essays, some of them written as papers for seminars and conferences organized by universities and other institutions such as the Sahitya Akademi. However, even as separate essays, they are connected by a common logic—a counter-logic, perhaps—that is also shared by a number of scholars from diverse Indian bhashas working in the field of Indian literature today. I have certainly benefited from my interaction with some of them during the long period of the book’s gestation. I know that it is not possible to name all the colleagues and fellow scholars who responded to my arguments when they were first presented at conferences. Let me, however, acknowledge the role of a few scholar friends who, either as organizers of conferences or as editors of publications, provided the initial impetus that led to the writing of the earlier versions of some of the chapters: Ipshita Chanda, Subha Chakrabarty Dasgupta, Amiya Dev, P.C. Kar, Mini Krishnan, Udaya Kumar, Jayanta Mahapatra, E.V. Ramakrishnan, K. Satchidanandan, and Harish Trivedi. Let me also remember two scholar friends who are no longer with us today: Meena Alexander and Avadhesh Kumar Singh. I am also thankful to P. Madhavan, K.M. Krishnan, and K.M. Seethi for reading and commenting on some of the chapters. I am thankful to E.V. Fathima whose draft translation of an essay that I originally wrote in Malayalam formed the basis for the analysis in one of the chapters. Most chapters are developed from critical essays written over the years, some of them published, some unpublished. Some of the material assembled in the book was collected while I was holding a UGC Emeritus Fellowship (2014–2016) at the School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University. I am thankful to the successive generations of postgraduate and research students of the past few years at the School of Letters, who formed the initial audiences for the ideas presented here. Several of the Malayalam books listed in the
Preface
bibliography were ferreted out for me by Mini G. Pillai and R. Saritha from the collections of rare books in the Mahatma Gandhi University Library. I am also thankful to the three unknown readers from the Oxford University Press who had provided useful comments on the book. The bibliography is an indication of my appreciation of the strong tradition of scholarship on Indian literature and modernity studies, to which I am indeed in great debt.
As always, Sherine has been the first to read this book, which she did with her sharp critical gaze. I am thankful to her as well as to Aparna for meticulously going through the typescript before it was sent to the printer.
Because of the book’s origin as a collection of essays written over a period of time, it would be natural and inevitable for certain key ideas to be repeated in parts of the work. Though caution has been taken at the time of editing to erase repetitions, I would not be surprised if the reader still comes across a few instances of arguments being repeated over chapters. I crave the reader’s indulgence in this matter. As regards the quotations appearing in the book, whenever I cite works from Indian languages other than Malayalam, I have taken care to use standard translations available. As for the translations from Malayalam, they are invariably mine, except where I have specifically mentioned other translators.
Chapter12: Journal of Literature and Aesthetics,Vol.14(2014)(Theessoriginallytitled‘Bilingualismand theEveryday:BhaktiandVibhaktiinIndianWritinginEnglish’)
Chapter16:S.K.Pottekkat, The Story of the Time-piece: A Collection of Srt Stories. Trans.Venugopal Menon.NewDelhi:NiyogiBooks.(Forewordtitled‘SKPottekkat:WritingasFantasyTravel’)
Chapter18:Rajelakshmy, A Path and Many Shadows and Twelve Stories.Trans.RKJayasree.Hyderabad: OrientBlackSwan.(Introductiontitled‘Rajelakshmy:TheTaleandtheTeller’)
Introduction: Bhasha in Focus
This is a study of Indian literature in the context of recent discussions on modernity and its theoretical extensions such as the everyday and the social and historical imaginary. The book in essence is an analysis of the aesthetics and politics of modernity as they are embodied in Indian bhasha literatures of the past two centuries. Exploring the trajectory of modernity after Indian literature came into contact with colonialism in the early nineteenth century is indeed the primary object of the book, though the intricate ways in which the bhasha imagination negotiated questions clustering around such concepts as the literary, the historical, and the social as part of the encounter receive more focused attention in the enquiry. Though the work acknowledges the European provenance of modernity as a historical idea, it also recognizes the inherent complexity of the concept and its uneven and equivocal connotations when used with reference to particular cultures outside Europe, especially with reference to the bhasha communities in India. Theoretical issues debated in relation to modernity such as its conceptual affinities with the western enlightenment project, its ideological investment in European aesthetics, and its implication for the evolution and development of Indian literatures are important for the study. The work also examines the local and regional strengths of the literary imagination that turns everyday experiences into aesthetically significant bhasha events. The critique of the idea of the aesthetic—hermetic aesthetic, as it is sometimes described in these pages—in this process, undergoes a radical transformation that assigns a new political force to the act of writing. Although the book is concerned with issues pertaining to Indian literatures in general, the theoretical postulates undergirding it are illustrated with the help primarily of Malayalam literature, with supplementary inputs from other bhasha literatures and Indian English literature.
‘Modernity’ is understood here not as a singular event, but as a complex and layered phenomenon that manifests across languages, both in India and abroad, in multiple forms. Traditionally, especially in the European context, modernity used to be identified with the breakdown of the feudal order and the emergence of new social formations in the wake of large-scale industrialization. It is this understanding of modernity that Anthony Giddens draws upon when he formulates a preliminary definition for it: ‘Modernity refers to modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from around the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence’ (1990: 1). The assumption here is that modernity is a universal state of being towards which all cultures travel, discarding past beliefs. This monolithic view of modernity certainly is important in the history of contemporary social theory. However, one cannot ignore the fact that this view is under challenge from various quarters today, both on account of its Euro-centric bias and its positivistic orientation. On the one hand, while there are important thinkers such as Perry Anderson (1984) and Bruno Latour (1993) who consider modernity more as a matter of faith or misrecognition and who question its conceptual and historical bases, there are also writers like K.M. Panikkar (1953), Walter Rodney (1972), and Eduardo Galeano (1973) who, on the other hand, draw attention to the grave injustice it has perpetrated on the people of Asia, Africa, and South America. Besides, as argued by scholars like Shmuel Eisenstadt and Lawrence Grossberg who talk about multiple and, especially nonwestern, modernities, while one is justified in granting ‘historical precedence’ and status as a point of reference to the western form, it can by no means be regarded as the only ‘authentic’ version of modernity today (Eisenstadt 2000: 2–3). Modernity can manifest in diverse forms across cultures, and it is not imperative that it should have an adversarial relation with tradition in all societies. There could be interpenetrations between the values connected with tradition and modernity in specific societies, situations that might prompt one to be suspicious of simplistic definitions that consider ‘modern’ to be wholly and exclusively non-traditional and ‘traditional’ as everything that is dated and obsolete. One might do well to remember in this context that the social awakening in India associated with such ‘traditional’ figures as the Buddha, Tiruvalluvar, the poets affiliated to the medieval Bhakti movement, or saints of modern times like Sri
Narayana Guru can also be regarded as constituting important moments in the evolution of distinctively Indian versions of modernity.
The present study, therefore, adopts the idea of a proliferation of modernities as a way of dealing with the concept’s nuanced, contested, and contradictory character. While modernity’s leverage as a desirable term for a mindset promoting liberal, enlightened, and scientific vision is indeed valuable, it is impossible to ignore its negative meaning as a representation of the language of ‘tyranny’ associated with the discourse of western rationality. This is where one feels compelled to talk about an Indian context for modernity in which concepts such as ‘everyday’, ‘worldliness’, ‘sociality’, ‘secularism’, ‘bilingualism’, ‘polyphony’, ‘democracy’, ‘resistance’, ‘nationalism’, and so on gain varied and vibrant resonances. These and other terms are used in this study not in any narrowly defined sense in which specific theorists might have used them in their formulations, but are deployed in a larger, often non-European, context where one can interweave questions of history, culture, and politics with literary texts. The idea of the historical and the social in this context can be seen entering into a critical dialogue with concepts such as ‘ideology’, ‘hegemony’, ‘habitus’, and ‘social imaginary’ as well as with their more recent variants appearing in the writings of such social thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Romila Thapar, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Charles Taylor, Edward Said, Arjun Appadurai, and several others.
The concept of the ‘everyday’ that figures prominently in these pages, though borrowed from the social theory of Henri Lefebvre, is used here to describe bhasha literatures’ interest not only in the ordinary and the non-elite, but in forms and structures that would allow a sense of thisworldliness to be worked into the conception of literature. Though the principles of art as handed down to Indian literary scholarship by western aesthetics leave little room for an understanding of literature in non-esoteric terms, it is art’s turn to the social and the everyday that has arguably allowed bhasha literatures to weave new forms of critical consciousness into the experience of literature at various stages of the evolution of modernity in India. It is in this sense that the everyday signals the advent of a new epistemology concerned with the representation of immanent objects rather than of a transcendent reality, and implies the emergence of a new aesthetic that is geared to a radical understanding of
culture. Lefebvre makes a distinction between ‘everyday’ and ‘daily life’, and alludes, echoing in some sense Baudelaire’s definition of the ‘modern’, to the transience and impermanence of the mundane and the commonplace. The everyday, as he sees it, is what is excluded from philosophy, and it is this exclusion that accounts for its departure from elite responses and forms of thought, including art and literature of the esoteric kind. This is what makes modernity’s relation with high art and elite literature a matter of concern in considerations of the sociology of writing. Also, while the everyday represents the quotidian at the temporal level, it can also get spatialized in artworks and literary pieces to include the minor and the marginalized. Art and literature in the past revelled in epic and philosophical themes expressed in a grand, secure, and self-assured language, but the advent of modernity in the alternative sense cited here appeared to pose severe threats to this security and self-assurance.
The theoretically sensitive cultural deliberation that the book represents cannot be divorced from the postcolonial and comparative reading of texts and trends from diverse Indian bhashas being carried out by countless scholars in Indian languages today. In that sense, the book may also be regarded as an attempt at formulating a new critical paradigm for the study of Indian literature from a comparative and interliterary perspective. The repeated references made herein to the bilingualism and multilingualism inherent to the Indian literary ethos would perhaps require further comment. Though one might differ on the precise ways in which the presence of multilingualism in the literary imagination was theorized in ancient days, no one would dare to contest, in the face of historical evidence unearthed from both literary and non-literary sources, that exchanges between languages and literatures in India in the past were considerable. Such exchanges indeed went beyond instances of women and the working-class speaking Prakrit in ancient Sanskrit drama, or of the manifestations of linguistic hybridity in medieval and early modern South Indian literatures, especially Malayalam literature, whose Manipravalam traditions are being subjected to fresh critical scrutiny by cultural studies scholars today. It seems to have been natural for an Indian text in the past to move from one language to another in the form of what we today broadly describe as ‘translation’, but which circulated through narrative reconstructions realized, sometimes in the name of literature, but more often in the name of devotional songs, oral tales,
moral fables, and hagiographies. This certainly was a question that Indian scholars such as Buddhadev Bose, Sisir Kumar Das, Sujit Mukherjee, A.K. Ramanujan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Namvar Singh, and Ayyappa Paniker who did pioneering work in comparative literature in the past were serious about, but who, in the absence of material evidence from individual languages, apparently could not make much headway in their efforts. The situation, to be sure, has improved in recent days, primarily because of the significant work that is being done in several bhashas today, not by literary scholars alone, but by historians, social scientists, folklorists, and cultural studies specialists as well. In the light of the new developments, one might feel compelled to reimagine the literary landscape of premodern and modern India as a dynamic terrain marked by interliterary exchanges and the circulation of texts and ideas across cultures. One might also be persuaded to consider the polyphonic culture associated with the Indian creative mind as an integral characteristic of Indian modernity.
No exaggerated significance needs to be read into the use of the word bhasha in the title or in the text. It is significant to the extent that bhasha, its root sense of expressive lucidity apart, is the common word for ‘speech’ or ‘a regional dialect’ in most Indian languages, especially when used in opposition to the hegemonic language of Sanskrit. Sometimes the term is used as an affix to indicate the translation in the regional language of a well-known text in Sanskrit as, for example, in Bhasha Kautaliyam, the twelfth-century Malayalam rewriting of Kautilya’s Arthasasthra. In premodern times, when the word appears prefixed or suffixed to the title of a literary work, it invariably means a non-Sanskritic work as in Bhasha Bhushan, the seventeenth century Hindi treatise on poetics by Jaswant Singh, Gita-govinda Bhasha, the seventeenth-century Maithili translation of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, or Bhasha Naishadham Champu, the eighteenth-century Malayalam retelling of the story of Nala by Mazhamangalath Nampoothiri. The word indeed is of Sanskrit origin, though its anti-hegemonic thrust in the Indian linguistic context confers on it a degree of political power. There are a few more implications that the word has gained from its historically evolving semantic environment that might further deepen its political potential. One of these is that the word is sometimes used in opposition to chandah or a Vedic verse, and in that sense, enjoys a lowly status in the hierarchically organized
order of linguistic practice in past societies. It is possible that the inferior status of bhasha in relation to Sanskrit as a language is an extension of this. Added to this is the fact that the corresponding word for bhasha that the colonial officers used in the imperial days was ‘vernacular’, a word that originally signified a Latinate dialect spoken by domestic slaves in ancient Roman provinces. In the past, bhashas often implied languages used by the common people both for day-to-day communication and for the oral rendering of tales and narratives in a multilingual ambience, for which the dominant languages of Sanskrit, and later, English, had remained unavailable. Bhasha can also signify the possibility of interpretive plurality, especially in the expression bhashya, where it suggests a ‘vernacular’ reading of a master text in Sanskrit. Perhaps it was the political significance that the word acquired from these and other aspects of its semantic context that prompted Indian scholars critical of the hegemony of Sanskrit to use the word bhasha with reference to the literature written in the regional languages. ‘With such happenings a profound egalitarian impulse entered the hegemonic structure of Indian society’, says Ananthamurthy, one of the earliest to use the word in this sense (2014: 81). It is the subaltern and resistance potential implied by the term bhasha that this book seeks to draw upon in talking about bhasha literature and the bhasha gaze.
The perspective outlined here should certainly provide a new critical angle to the scholar engaged in the study of the interaction between language, history, identity, power, subjectivity, culture, genre, gender, region, nation, tradition, fantasy, and imagination—elements that contribute towards the making of the ideology of a people. Questions pertaining to the social, the marginal, the literary, the colonial, and the postcolonial, when deployed in the specific context of the construction and evolution of literary cultures in Indian bhashas will also be viewed differently in the altered environment. Inasmuch as the matter impinges on the imaginary constitution of the Indian nation with its inevitable entanglements with the larger, international world, this is not merely a literary question, but is one that is deeply political in import. It is this import that scholars like A.K. Ramanujan, Amiya Dev, Bhalchandra Nemade, Ngugi wa Thiong’O, Ganesh Devy, and others recognize when they choose to talk critically about the border-crossing function of literature, whether the concept debated is Indian literature or world literature. The kind of
aesthetic abstraction that accompanies the iconization and canonization of literary texts, in this context, perhaps cannot be looked upon as the norm in Indian literature. Though such abstractions and iconizations might suit the tyrannical purposes of colonial modernity, what manifests in Indian bhasha literatures of the modern period, enriched as they are with the culture of polyphony as well as the architecture of the social and the everyday, is a drift away from aesthetic abstraction towards a more concrete and politically significant articulation of experience.
It is as an expression of the understanding of the literary process described above that the present book has been conceived and designed. Though the chapters that constitute the study have their origin as independent essays written over the past decade, they are held together in the present volume by the subtle political connection mentioned above. All the chapters have been reworked thoroughly for the present publication, so that their originals exist only as spectral presences in them. The book itself is divided into three sections, the first two consisting of seven chapters and the third of six chapters: Section I: Historicizing Bhasha Literature; Section II: Border- Crossing Bhasha Literature; and Section III: Six Ways of Being Modern: Reading a Bhasha Canon.
The key concepts around which the discussion in the book turns have been broached and elaborated in the chapters forming Section I. The arguments here seek to historicize bhasha literatures, and are set against a broad canvas. The section establishes the book’s general perspective on Indian literature and inquires into the various ways in which bhasha literatures engaged with modernity both as a concept and as an aspect of reality during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The deliberations carried out, however, are not exclusively theoretical, because what the chapters in this section attempt to do in essence is throw open the conceptual world, before letting it fuse gently with the larger literary cosmos of Indian bhashas. Specimens from Indian literature come alive in these chapters against the dynamic background of a world of cultural interaction where concepts like the everyday, the social imaginary, the hermetic aesthetic, translation, decolonization, literary history, and so on cease to be articulations of pure theory with no connection with lived and imagined reality. Thus in the first three chapters titled ‘Modernity and Indian Literature’, ‘The Everyday as Modernity’, and ‘Print Capitalism
and Modernity’, the bhasha-centred resonances associated with specific concepts are illustrated with copious examples from Indian literatures, especially from the Malayalam missionary literature of the nineteenth century, as well as from writings and translations from Malayalam and Indian English. Chapters 1 and 2 try to make sense of Indian modernity by scrutinizing the signals of everydayness animating the specimens of bhasha writing and by analysing the spirit of pluralism and secularism that they are imbued with. Chapter 3 takes up the question of the evolution of printed prose as a medium of creative communication in Indian languages in the nineteenth century which, even as it can be interpreted as a process marking the passage from the traditional to the modern, can also be construed as indicating the advent of a logic that disregards the emotional make-up of the colonized subject. Chapter 4, titled ‘The Literary Process and the Social Imaginary’ critically examines the evolution of twentieth-century Malayalam poetry as a prototype of the history of modern Indian literature. The chapter reveals that the successive stages of nationalist-progressive writing, modernist writing, and postmodernist writing, which are stereotypically represented as following one after the other in literary history are to be viewed in fact as expressions of contests and contradictions within the social imaginary surrounding the Indian literary mind. Though literary history in a narrowly defined sense cannot be considered the main focus of attention in these four chapters, their implication in the debates on the literary evolution of India can hardly be overlooked. Questions concerning literary history loom large in the remaining chapters of the section too. The principles underlying translation in Indian literary history are debated in all their inherent complexity in Chapters 5 and 6, titled, respectively, ‘Translation and Literary History’ and ‘Decolonizing Translation’. These two chapters chart the epistemological connection between modernity and translation. Inasmuch as translation is understood as a matter concerning truth, the two chapters examine how re-writing truth in diverse ways has been of prime concern to literary traditions in bhashas. There certainly is the dominant view that the Indian novels and prose translations of the nineteenth century were merely translating western modernity into the language of the colonized. On the other hand, one might also look upon these specimens as continuing the practices and traditions of literary re-writing that were strong in several Indian languages from the days of antiquity. These and other
reflections on the dynamics of translation directed at an expansion of the universe of literary experience might also warrant a rethinking of the idea of world literature, which is carried out in Chapter 7, titled ‘Bhasha Writing as World Literature’.
Section II examines Indian literature from a comparativist perspective. The chapters forming this section are text-and-author-based readings rather than concept-based analyses, and they discuss the issues raised in the earlier section from a more closely focused, albeit pan-Indian, perspective. The section opens with Chapter 8, ‘Towards a Comparative Indian Literature’, which initiates a discussion of the general problems connected with reading bhasha literatures in comparison. The chapter examines the radical ways in which the idea of comparative literature has been rethought in recent days to incorporate into it the lessons of the cultural turn that of late has overtaken literary studies. The approach certainly is important for the study of Indian literature with its ambivalent attitude to colonial modernity and its inbuilt polyphonic dynamic. The finer details of this are explored in the subsequent chapters. Chapters 9, ‘Realism in the Bhasha Novel: The Case of Paraja’, and Chapter 10, ‘Modernity and Kesari’s Ambivalences’ dealing, respectively, with Gopinath Mohanty’s pre-Independence Odia novel Paraja and Malayalam scholar Kesari Balakrishna Pillai’s critical essays of the same period, are particularly significant in this regard, for the reason that they both illustrate the schism and divide in the modern Indian psyche through their ambivalent attitudes to colonial modernity. The ambivalence is evident in the writers’ attitude to progress and their vision, of the future in the case of Mohanty and of the present in the case of Kesari. Mohanty repudiates the Progressive Writers’ Association’s official interpretation of progress, while Kesari endorses it through his acquiescence in the idea of modernity-as-the-present. Both writers in this sense throw light on the divide in the idea of modernity. Versions of the divide continue to persist in the post-Independence Indian mind, as is demonstrated by the discussion in Chapter 11, titled ‘Region and Nation in Bhasha Poetry’ that follows. The chapter provides an analysis of the conflicted relationship between the nation and the region as it appears in selected bhasha poems from the languages of the Northeast as well as from Bengali, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam. Though modernity’s schism is what surfaces as the rift between the local and the national in
the poems reviewed in this chapter, the discussion also demonstrates that the democratic and egalitarian spirit that underlies bhasha literatures is strong enough to thwart attempts at cultural tyranny by the advocates of hyper-nationalism. Chapter 12, titled ‘The Bilingual Everyday in Bhasha Literature’, examines the issue of bilingualism in relation to Indian literatures as they attempt to articulate questions concerning the everyday. The chapter has a special focus on Indian English writing, as it is the literature written in the English language that often raises the question of bilingualism as a point of debate. This chapter also deals in a sense with the schism discussed, as crucial to the debate carried out here is the identification of a maimed language that is directly connected to English’s emotional aloofness from Indian bhashas. The bhashas are quite fortunate in this respect because of the innately multilingual contexts in which they thrive. They enrich each other by a mutual interanimation of the rhythms and cadences of individual bhashas. Chapter 13, titled ‘Modernity and Literary Historiography’, is an attempt to explore the possibilities of conceiving a critical literary historiography that would stay clear of the colonial cultural baggage that trammels available models of non-western literary historiography. Chapter 14, ‘A Latin American Moment in Indian Fiction’, again, is an examination of selected works from Indian literature read in comparison with a selection of Latin American writing. The method of reading texts in comparison adopted in this chapter indeed has been the main burden of the discussions carried out in Section II as a whole.
The chapters in Section III are attempts at revisiting a bhasha canon, which in the present instance happens to be the Malayalam literary canon of the twentieth century. Six authors are examined in this section, each representing a seminal aspect of Indian modernity that has not been discussed in detail in the previous sections. The authors discussed are M.T. Vasudevan Nair, S.K. Pottekkat, O.V. Vijayan, Rajelakshmy, Ayyappa Paniker, and Madhavikkutty/Kamala Das, all canonical figures, whose works exemplify the strengths and weaknesses as well as the conflicts and contradictions that are identified as markers of modern Indian literature. Each chapter, even as it enumerates the salient characteristics of an author’s output that might persuade one to place him/her in what can be described the ‘modern’ tradition in the language, also aims at a comprehensive assessment of the writer as a bhasha artist. The Epilogue, a kind
of coda to the volume, is a two-pronged reminder to the reader: a fairly sober reminder to the general reader of the fact that no ‘literary’ question can stay purely literary forever and, more particularly, a somewhat grim reminder specifically to the Indian reader of the troubled modern times in which she lives. The moral that one might draw from the Epilogue is clear: perhaps the calm confidence regarding the almost absolute impossibility of the emergence of linguistic fascism in the multilingual Indian context might appear to be illusory, given the fact of the more direct threat that the idea of Indian modernity is facing at the cultural–political level today.
Modernity and Indian Literature
Modernity is a complex concept that subsumes within itself a number of conflicting and contradictory ideas. At a preliminary level, it signifies the condition of being new and radically up-to-date, making one feel aloof in time from one’s past. Defined historically and somewhat narrowly, it is a term that refers to diverse aspects of the physical and mental architecture of the new world that emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century, and then spread to the rest of the world in subsequent centuries. In this sense, the term would cover both the technological developments of the period and the advances in knowledge and worldview made by society, and would imply an individual mindset that promotes the positive values of humanism, liberalism, enlightenment, scientificity, and secularism. The rise of urban and industrial culture, expansion of capitalism and colonialism, proliferation of the human sciences, and the evolution of bureaucracy would also be treated as part of the development of modernity. As a corollary to all this, the term has also acquired a mildly negative connotation as suggesting the language of ‘tyranny’ connected with the western discourse of rationality. Its association with temporal consciousness further alludes to its distance from tradition, generally counted as its opposite. Tradition and modernity, however, cannot be regarded as absolute and incompatible ideas that exclude each other, and it is this interconnection that makes modernity a complex phenomenon. As was pointed out in the Introduction, there is a clear interdependence of the values connected with tradition and modernity in concrete situations, prompting one to be suspicious of naive definitions that consider the ‘modern’ as wholly and exclusively non-traditional and the ‘traditional’ as everything that is obsolete and unmodern. One can be modern without being non-traditional, an idea that is being increasingly pursued in discussions of non-western, indigenous, and alternative versions of modernity. There is a good deal of published scholarship on this question in
circulation today, with reference especially to history and literature (e.g., Chatterjee 1997; Eisenstadt 2000; Chakrabarty 2001; Mohanty 2011).
Though the Europeanizing impulse underlying the colonial modernity project has been the focus of attention in debates on modernity, one must be sensitive to the presence of premodern, non-European traditions of radical social reform that can only be interpreted in terms of the aforementioned alternative versions, whose tenets run counter to the idea of a monolithic modernity project. No serious social theorist would nowadays talk about ‘a singular modernity’, though the theorist of postmodernity who used that phrase as the title of his work on modernity is fully aware of the complexity of the issue (Jameson 2002). ‘Modernity is a historical fact, but each culture has its own native modernity, a desi modernity’, writes Bhalchandra Nemade (2009: 14). ‘To think through the possibilities of refusing euro-modernity’, according to Lawrence Grossberg, has become a primary concern of much of the non-European world today (2012: 73). Making his case for a precolonial bhasha modernity without actually naming it so, G.N. Devy suggests, choosing his words cautiously and quoting critic R.B. Patankar, that ‘India might have brought itself to the threshold of modernity even without the British impact’ (1992: 56). Most alternative theories are capable of unsettling the central principles undergirding western modernity, whose discourse is being critically scrutinized for emblems that invoke its implication in the imperialist ideology. Scholars are also becoming increasingly aware of Europe’s continuing efforts at appropriating historiography in a globalized environment where, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, Europe has for long been geographically ‘provincialized’ by history (Chakrabarty 2001: 3). Even models of ‘rational’ language, of the finest order, can be shown to have existed in the non-European world. An example is that of the fourteenth–fifteenth century Malayalam mathematician Jyeshtadeva, whose Yuktibhasha (Rational Language) is today regarded as ‘the first book of calculus in the world’ (Gurukkal 2019: 95). In this context, the ideas of ‘reason’, ‘enlightenment’, and ‘renaissance’, sometimes proffered as the distinguishing characteristics of western modernity, may acquire new resonances in relation to the social trends in non-European cultures as, for example, in relation to the cultural awakening in India at the time of the Buddha, Tiruvalluvar, Basavanna, or Tukaram.
What this points to is the difficulty in treating modernity as an idea exclusively connected with the ‘modernization’ efforts initiated by the colonial forces. However, we should not also ignore the hegemonic form of modernity that exerted tremendous influence on the constitution of the idea of Indian literature. The Euro-centric sense in which the term has generally been used in scholarly discussions till recently also cannot be overlooked. Because of the ‘universalizing’ tendency associated with dominant versions of modernity, we see an open contradiction, an internal divide develops within the concept when we propose an Indian version of it.1 The hegemonic version would not, theoretically at least, allow for other roads to modernity, other than what has been prescribed by the dominant European form, and any deviation from this would appear to be a methodological flaw. Hence the divide in the conception of modernity, which appears as a schism between a few binaries—between the global and the national, the national and the regional, the abstract and the concrete, the secular and the non-secular, the eternal and the everyday, and the elite and the popular. Perhaps the schism itself is a primary characteristic of Indian modernity, suspended as it is between a monolithically organized power and a heterogeneously distributed agency. Indigenous ideas force themselves into Indian modernity through this schism and serve as an effective agency, resisting the powers of Euro-centrism and colonial domination. Modernity in the European context, after all, implies a social upheaval arising from a repudiation of the past, whereas the multiple forms of Indian modernity, even as they aim at a total overhauling of the culture by rejecting what is unhealthy in the past, also attempt to reconstitute the self by recovering from the past the memory of their struggles over history and cultural identity. As Walter Benjamin said in a famous passage, retrieving the past historically would mean recapturing ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’ (1973: 257). This is a difficult process, a process marked by tensions and contradictions, and taking place, especially in the contemporary world situation, in a site that is shared by cultural agencies with
1 The position on modernity outlined here is developed from the arguments given in the Introduction to my Texts, Histories, Geographies: Reading Indian Literature (Raveendran 2009a: 1–12) and the essay ‘Modernity and Knowledge Production: Malayalam Thought Processes in the Modern Period’, in Science, Literature and Aesthetics, (ed.) Amiya Dev (Raveendran 2009b: 744–767).
diverse, even antagonistic, ideological, and economic interests. It is the schism in modernity mentioned above that acts as a sort of buffer against the pressure emanating from these tensions and antagonisms. One might attempt to gauge the intensity of this schism as it narrows down in the Indian context, particularly at the site where colonial modernity comes into contact with literature and aesthetics.
There is ample reason for conceiving an Indian version of modernity as a heterogeneous compendium of pluralistic cultural strands. One of the pre-eminent senses in which modernity as a concept has been understood is as a secularizing process, where secularism carries with it the suggestion of a belief in the worldliness of experience as opposed to the hope for a transcendental resolution. The notion of this-worldliness is important in unravelling Indian modernity because of the pivotal role that the decentred cluster of cultural symbols and images drawn from diverse material constituents can play in a secular society’s imagination. Where Indian modernity differs from its western counterpart, basically, is in the way it maintains a critical relation with a pluralistic tradition of values as an aspect of the modernity project itself. If the cultural tyranny associated with western modernity appears somewhat impotent in the Indian context, it is essentially because of the recognition of the country’s inbuilt cultural pluralism, a characteristic that constitutes the modern Indian nation as well as the social imaginary surrounding the Indian literary mind.
One will have to consider, along with the internal schism that is part of the modernity project in India, the ‘dialectic’ of modernity that has shaped the logic of its progress in the present-day world (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002). The operation of this dialectic has been very crucial in the constitution of the modern Indian subject practising literature. The important point to note here is that it is an already fractured subject that gains entry into the texts of Indian bhasha literatures. The concrete manifestations of this fracture are multiform, as indicated by the powerful articulations of feminist, Dalit, folk, and tribal consciousness in the bhasha literary scene today. Inasmuch as modernity in its vintage form swore by a monolithic literary experience that was autonomous and self-validating, the emergence of Dalit, folk, and feminist expressive forms that validated themselves with reference to ‘extra-literary’ experiences could be regarded as a manifestation of modernity’s dialectic that
entails its eventual disintegration. The cultural pluralism characterizing the Indian social imaginary indeed is sufficient to justify the presence of these trends, though one might legitimately wonder why it has taken so long for such trends to appear in the public realm. Modernity’s dialectic might perhaps be able to explain this delay too. Connected with this is also the idea of the degeneration of the spirit of modernity at the historical level. The suggestion here is that modernity is doomed from the very beginning by its own inner logic, because acquisition of knowledge, a function of modernity, would invariably lead to forms of tyranny that, in order to sustain themselves, would breed myths that could invalidate both modernity and knowledge.
To probe a little further into the recent invasion of the Indian creative imagination by new forms of literary consciousness, one might examine how these forms constitute a departure from the dominant literary practice connected with colonial modernity. If modernity in its hegemonic form implies an attitude that promotes a monolithic view of culture, the pluralistic literary streams in India can only be regarded as deviant forms that do not take after the canonical literary tradition. They can only be treated as ‘little’ traditions, most of which are expected to pay obeisance to the great Indian tradition that is the repository of the dominant aesthetic. As this aesthetic insists on viewing literature as something that has been sealed off from the everyday realities of the mundane world, one might designate it the ‘hermetic aesthetic’. This is a literary ideology of European origin connected with eighteenth-century western aesthetics that came to India and other Third World cultures in the shape in which it exists today through modernity and colonial mediation, though it is pertinent to remember that India found it easy to integrate the ideology into its poetics because of the concept’s basically metaphysical character. It was the metaphysical ambience of India’s non-secular and quasi-religious literary institution that facilitated a quick assimilation of the idea of literature’s autonomy as formulated by the European romantic theorists at the dawn of modernity. Art’s autonomy has continued to be the central principle of literary modernism that flourished in diverse Indian languages in the mid-twentieth century. Inasmuch as this concept addresses the wider question of literature itself becoming dissociated from material and historical practice, it coincides with the literary ideology of contemporary global culture as well.
There indeed is reason to believe that the development of the hermetic aesthetic was but the natural culmination of the progress of the colonial literary ideology that from the very beginning wanted the discourse of imagination to be kept separate from the discourse of reason. One will only have to look at the contents of some of the early literary publications that arose in Indian bhashas as a result of the colonial contact for a corroboration of this observation. Look, for example, at the contents of Vidyasamgraham (1864–1866), one of the early printed Malayalam periodicals published under the supervision of Christian missionaries, the harbingers of western modernity to Kerala.2 The most interesting point about the articles published in this magazine is that it provides a decisive clue to the kind of discourse that developed as a result of colonial modernity. It was a discourse of rationality—of instrumental reason—that, as we see it today, has for long remained blind to certain basic aspects of culture. All forms of knowledge in the era of modernity were articulated within the limits of this discourse. These include knowledge forms in the inchoate areas not only of science, aesthetics, and literature but also of ethics, history, socio-political reform, administration, and jurisprudence. Even a casual perusal of the contents of the eight published issues of Vidyasamgraham would indicate that, in spite of the journal’s apparently multi-disciplinary thrust, almost all the articles included in it argued ultimately for an amelioration of the material condition of man. Modernity, in the end, and by implication, was defined in terms of such an amelioration, for which modern education was presented as the most potent and useful instrument. The title of Vidyasamgraham (literally, a compendium of learning) pointed specifically to this moral purpose. So did almost all the articles printed, not only the essays on such topics as the steam engine and the telegraph, whose overtly scientific subject matter connected them directly with the advances of modern technology, but also the essays on the subjects of religion and ethics supposed to express a transcendental vision. This, in a sense, is part of the general colonial tendency, shared alike by the scholars associated
2 This bilingual journal was published as a college magazine from C.M.S. College, an institution started by the Church Missionary Society at Kottayam as part of its educational reform project in the nineteenth century. Eight issues of the journal were published from 1864 to 1866. The issues of Vidyasamgraham were collected and reissued in 1993 by the Benjamin Bailey Research Centre connected with the College in the form of a single volume.
with the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in the east and the Bombay Literary Society in the west of India.
There is also an attempt to see modern science in terms of colonial modernity’s missionary ethics. One of the essays on ethics (‘Sanmargopadesam’ meaning ‘ethical instruction’) printed in the first issue of the journal, for example, talks about the importance of producing authentic books about modern science in Malayalam. This attitude has continued to be significant for all discourses connected with modern knowledge in the era of colonialism. Even works of imaginative literature are cast in the discursive mould preset for pragmatic writing and instrumental rationality. This is what one is to deduce from the novels produced in Malayalam in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most of them translations from western and Indian languages, all speaking the moralizing idiom of evangelism. One might think especially of Catherine Hannah Mullens’s Bengali novel, Phulmoni o Korunar Biboron (1852) and Mrs. Collins’s English novel, The Slayer Slain (1859), both of which were translated into Malayalam a few years after their initial publication, and were in due course to take their places in the history of early Malayalam fiction.
There is no point in looking for the protocols of the hermetic aesthetic or of any variety of aesthetics in this environment, as the public culture in India, in colonial modernity’s scheme of things, was not considered sufficiently ‘mature’ to handle aesthetically significant material. This is evident in the creative tension in Chandu Menon, the author of the novel Indulekha (1889), who ventures into the business of novel writing after trying unsuccessfully to translate into Malayalam some of his favourite English novels. His purpose in a sense is to translate colonial modernity into Malayalam in a context where he finds it difficult to disengage from the matrix of interconnected ideas pertaining to modernity, such as education, reform, ethics, and science. The matrix, prosaic in form and with no twists and turns that mark the language of poetry, is integral to the ideology of colonialism. One can translate this matrix with the same ease that one may have in translating any of the essays on popular science that regularly appeared in the pages of Vidyasamgraham and other missionary journals. Chandu Menon refers in the introduction to his novel to the response of a learned friend who asserts that fiction is a luxury that the Malayalam language would do well to disregard. ‘Books on science
are the need of the hour. Malayalam has no place for books on other subjects at the moment’, the friend is on record as telling Menon (Chandu Menon 2014: 9–10). The statement corresponds with the general tone of colonial modernity which, in the Indian context, puts a premium on the language of reason at the expense of the language of imagination. Most Malayalam narratives published prior to Indulekha were merely attempts at translating the ethics of colonial reason into the culture of the colonized. Indulekha belonged to a different class of fiction. Though full of internal contradictions, one might consider this novel to embody Indian modernity’s pioneering attempt to recapture the domain of imagination and the aesthetic, long overshadowed by colonial modernity’s ethics of reason.
To pursue the trajectory of the ethics of colonial reason further, one might elaborate the unfolding scenario as a discursive formation, as an organization of language that constitutes modes of knowledge within the structures of inclusion and exclusion. Bernard S. Cohn, in a wellknown essay, argues for such a formation to have emerged in the nineteenth century in parts of India, which according to him, acted as ‘the language of command’ and did the work of ‘converting Indian forms of knowledge into European objects’ (1997: 21). Discourse in this formulation is to be understood as a specific and somewhat inescapable way of speaking about the world of social experience, which in India in the age of colonial modernity is linked to the western enlightenment project ‘devoted to the cultivation and spread of modern sciences and arts among Indians, if possible in the Indian languages’ (Chatterjee 1997: 15–16). The primary objective of starting educational institutions in the nineteenth century under the aegis of colonial administration, whether through the missionaries or through the reformists in India, was, as Partha Chatterjee observes, the ‘nationalization of modern knowledges’ that would serve the interests of colonial modernity (1997: 16). In fact, the motive behind the institution of C.M.S. College, the birthplace of Vidyasamgraham, could not have been much different from the reason given for the founding of Hindu College (renamed Presidency College later) at Calcutta in the same period, and this involved, in the words of S.C. Sengupta, a former Principal of the Hindu College, ‘the cultivation of English literature and European science rather than Hindu theology or metaphysics’ (quoted in Bagchi 1994: 150). The asymmetries between
Cohn’s views on the conversion of Indian forms of knowledge into colonial objects and Chatterjee’s on the nationalization of western forms of knowledge indeed are only apparent. Both speak essentially about the process of knowledge formation, and the superficial difference between them would dissolve the moment one remembers that discourse after all is a way of organizing knowledge and experience within the structures and processes of power.
The analysis carried out above indicates that though nineteenthcentury missionary discourse may appear to be different in flavour from Cohn’s ‘language of command’ designed specifically to introduce young British officials to the manners and customs of a subjected race, it certainly partook of the rational, scientific, and pragmatic qualities appropriate to the language of immediate reference in the colonial world. This is yet another way in which the dialectic of modernity operated in Kerala. Colonial modernity split the discursive practice into an emotionally surcharged private language and a rationally controlled public language, and promoted the latter as the appropriate medium for all inter-personal communication, including aesthetic communication.
The path that the discourse adopted to strengthen itself too partook of this dialectic. The technology of printing that started making its impact on the reading habits of the people of Kerala from the early nineteenth century is an instance of this. Though printing helped in spreading literacy and the positive values of civility and sociality among the masses, and led to a weakening of the aristocracy’s hold on knowledge resources, printing’s inherent bias against textual pluralism can be seen to have exerted some deleterious impact on the process of modernization. Subsequent developments have also seen the technology of printing becoming crucial in the consolidation of the arbitrary and instrumentalist dimensions of modernity. This arose not only from the specific, identifiable messages that printed prose communicated, whose ideational force in a society in transition can hardly be underestimated, but also and more importantly, from the ideological function that printing discharged by setting up norms for writing and reading. Printing set precise limits for the discourse and determined the shape of the knowledge in circulation. By promoting assumptions about normal and deviant forms of knowledge, it also helped society decide what was to be counted as true knowledge.
Prior to the advent of printing, knowledge and literature circulated in Kerala, as it did in other parts of the world, either orally among the masses or through hand-copied palm-leaf or other kinds of manuscripts kept in collections maintained often by kings and the aristocracy, to which only a minority had access. In broad terms, one might say that both these forms of knowledge transmission were accommodative of socio-historical dynamics in that the oral and manuscript transmission of literary and philosophical knowledge allowed for the limits of knowledge to be set and re-set in each instance of oral performance or the copying by the hand of manuscripts. Though it is possible to imagine a particularly mischievous interpreter or copyist entering a wild interpolation into a newly made text, it is more sensible to assume that interpolative changes are normal, and are, in most cases, historically conditioned. Romila Thapar says with reference to the various versions of the Śakuntalā story in its travel across history that ‘when a theme changes in accordance with its location at a historical moment, the change can illumine that moment, and the moment in turn may account for the change’ (1995: vii). A.K. Ramanujan states that a poet never tires of chiselling at his poem to make it read better, but the history of its evolution comes to an end the moment it gets into print. ‘By printing it you put a kind of moratorium on it’, says Ramanujan (2001: 45). At an epistemological level, what printing did was to introduce the notions of textual purity and authenticity into the domain of culture. These notions were quite unknown to premodern scholarship that paid little attention to the ‘true’ versions of texts—whether they are proverbs, legends, songs, or tales—transmitted orally. These were moves of standardization and authorization introduced into a society that had no idea of such processes. The production of printed dictionaries and books of grammar can be said to have further reinforced these moves.
To come back to the evolution of fiction and its linkage with modernity, it is obvious that Indulekha was born at the intersection of the discursive and epistemological complexities sketched above. It was an extremely complex novel that maintained a somewhat contradictory relationship with the age that produced it. It partook of the scientific temper of the Vidyasamgraham essays and the moralizing idiom of Mrs. Mullens’s and Mrs. Collins’s translated novels. In this sense, it was a translation of the mood and environment of rationality and scientific thinking that
