Abstract
Already a tradition several decades old, in the first decade after independence (in 1947) the short story emerged as the primary genre in Hindi, but also in other Indian literatures, to grapple with contemporary experiences and to learn about other Indian and world literatures. The short story was so popular that magazines solely devoted to the genre were launched, primary among them Kahānī (Short Story, 1954), established by Shripat Rai, one of the two sons of the hallowed Hindi-Urdu writer Premchand. Already since the 1940s, the Hindi literary field had been deeply polarised between the Progressive Writers’ Association, controlled in the early 1950s by a hardcore group of critics and writers, and those who protested the Progressives’ ideological emphasis. In the 1950s, this polarization became strengthened by Cold-War literary interventions and translated into two different visions of world literature: one clearly oriented towards China, the USSR, and Eastern Europe and a canon of communist or leftist writers from western countries (Howard Fast, Upton Sinclair, etc.); and another vision more open to and interested in writers from other countries. But the 1950s were also the first decade of Indian independence, and they saw magazines like Kahānī undertake literary activism in other ways, too, namely: (a) by emphasizing translations of contemporary writing in other Indian languages, which formed more than half of the magazine’s content; (b) by having at least one foreign short story in every issue; (c) by democratizing access to reading and encouraging “democratic” discussions of literature through the establishment of a “Kahani Club” and inviting readers to participate. This chapter explores and evaluates Kahānī’s literary activism in the context of the political polarization of Hindi and world literature in the early Cold War, of the relationship between Hindi and other Indian language literatures, and between them and English, and in relation to the work that the short story as a genre was called upon to perform.
Highlights
How are we to understand the choice of magazine editors to publish ‘the latest’, or else modern or earlier ‘classics’—in other words, a temporal as well as spatial production of world literature? Building on Andrew Rubin’s argument that ‘the accelerated transmission’ of texts across journals affiliated to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s ‘respatialize[d] world literary time’, Elizabeth Holt has proposed that this ‘near-simultaneous publication of essays, interviews, and sometimes stories and poems in multiple [CCF] journals and affiliated publications engendered a global simultaneity of literary aesthetics and discourses of political freedom and commitment’
As already mentioned, Kamleshwar borrows the title of João Guimarães Rosa’s story ‘The Third Bank of the River’ to suggest a literary way out of the ideological polarization and Cold War blocs. While he effectively makes a case for the ‘Global South’, he uses Rosa’s story to point to the common uncertainty of the human predicament in the contemporary world (I stick to the masculine subject of the original): In this issue we find the voice [svar] of almost three quarters of the population of the world
How do magazines—ephemeral print objects—produce world literature? Isn’t the considerable investment needed for sourcing and translating texts incommensurate to the time it takes to read and discard a magazine? (And a reason why such intensive bouts of translational activism usually do not last beyond five years.) This chapter has suggested visibility, recursivity, and temporality as categories of analysis, and assessed different kinds of ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ coverage
Summary
To borrow Amit Chaudhuri’s phrase, magazines were sites of intense ‘literary activism’: an activism by editors on behalf of literature to champion new writers and encourage readers’ tastes, and a constant critical interrogation on the value and function of literature.. Building on Andrew Rubin’s argument that ‘the accelerated transmission’ of texts across journals affiliated to the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s and 1960s ‘respatialize[d] world literary time’, Elizabeth Holt has proposed that this ‘near-simultaneous publication of essays, interviews, and sometimes stories and poems in multiple [CCF] journals and affiliated publications engendered a global simultaneity of literary aesthetics and discourses of political freedom and commitment’.19 While this is the language that magazine editors often spoke in this period, what they publish tells a different story. As I argue below, the bumper special issues that Kamleshwar devoted to world stories around different themes in particular produced a ‘spectacular internationalism’ that paralleled and even exceeded that of the Asian-African Writers’ Association’s magazine Lotus.23 Such spectacular special issues made visible and palpable the richness and variety of African, Asian, and Latin American literatures, while the presence here and there of contemporary European and North American writers as part of this panoply only emphasized the non-centrality of the latter. 21 Roanne Kantor, South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Unexpected Journey to Global English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
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