Imagining Otherwise: Comparative South Asian Literatures and the MLA

Abstract

As someone who entered the United States as a foreign student in the late 1980s, my academic career was intensely shaped by the then burgeoning discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism.1 The triumvirate of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha functioned like a citation machine; and despite Said's Orientalism, South Asia, especially India, dominated as the colonial/postcolonial site par excellence. Much of this had to do not just with the presence of many a South Asian scholar studying, writing, and teaching in U.S. universities but also with the fact that some of the most brilliant work was being undertaken on India: Lata Mani's work on the discourses on sati, the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her famous essays on the Rani of Sirmur, and of course Bhabha's legendary essays “Sly Civility” and “Signs Taken for Wonders.” The outpouring of anglophone fiction from South Asia, topped off by the publication of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, made certain that there would be no dearth of work on South Asian (read Indian) postcolonial fiction, and even today, despite a fairer distribution of attention to other parts of the ex-colonial worlds, works on South Asia continue to dominate the scene. Much has been written about this privileging of South Asia (again, read India) and its incarnation as the quintessential postcolonial site, and I am not going to rehearse the debates here. But suffice it to say that while my teaching spans continents, my first book was part and parcel of the work on the discourse of gender and nationalism in colonial and postcolonial literary representations by British, Bengali, and anglophone South Asian writers. But, in another sense the book was comparative because it brought into play writers working in different languages, and I remember getting a report from Cambridge University Press asking me why there was no chapter on Rushdie. It was Ken Wissoker's insightfulness that led to the publication of my book, En-gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives, by Duke University Press in 2000.I wanted to preface this short piece with these personal remarks because my background helps clarify my position in taking up the subject of the comparative analysis of South Asian literature within the structure of the MLA. I do not think of myself as a South Asianist or an Indianist or Indologist or an expert in Indian literature. I am, for better or worse, a postcolonialist and my personal location within the MLA structure is as a postcolonialist, especially since I was one of the key people to initiate and ultimately get the MLA to approve the Postcolonial Discussion Group that eventually attained division status. So, I know the many pitfalls, negotiations, and compromises that attend working within the MLA structure. On a side note, I was also part of a working group that has tried to rethink the unwieldy organizational rubric of another division: English Literature Other Than British and American (or, as I think of it, “A Division by Any Other Name: Other Anglophone Literatures as World Literature?”). I say all of this to suggest the enormity of even broaching what it would mean (1) to think about modern world literatures, (2) to think about the role of South Asian literature within that, (3) to think about the discipline of comparative literature, and (4) the relationship of these three issues to the MLA.In a crucial way, the question proposed by this forum resonates with recent debates about world literature—how do we account for the subject? how do we teach it? how do we anthologize it? And so on. There is a flourishing Facebook discussion group called Rethinking World Literature (discussions around the topic of what constitutes “world literature”) with, at last count, 1,664 members and as many divergent opinions.2 What often strikes me about these discussions is the manner in which debates that were hashed out under the rubric of what is postcolonial literature (discussions around the topic of what constitutes “postcolonial literature”) constantly resurface under the guise of world literature. The ringing of the death knell of postcolonial studies has been sounding ever since the inception of the category. However, it increasingly appears that to say postcolonial studies is dead is a way to ignore thirty years or so of the contributions made by postcolonial scholars and critics and to segue in a facile fashion to congratulatory discussions about transnationalism and engagements with world literature.World literature is being produced as an object of study in anthologies and in books claiming new and innovative ways of thinking about the world republic of letters. Such worldings echo what Spivak in a very early essay calls the worlding of the third world. In the essay, Spivak draws our attention to the ways in which canonical novels from the nineteenth century participate in the project of producing worlds for colonized and colonial subjects. As I read seminal critical texts that grapple with the idea of the elusive category of world literature as an object of study, I see a repetition of the colonial fantasy of capturing the world in a self-congratulatory mode sans hesitation: a world centered and routed through Paris (Pascale Casanova), reproduced for a palatable consumption in anthologies (David Damrosch et al.), and consolidated in practices where other worlds continue to be relegated to distant reading through syncopated translations (Franco Moretti). Such production of worlds seems to stem from a longing for stability, a controlled language base that would hold at bay the babel of tongues rather than rejoice in their fecundity.We need to remember the genealogy of postcolonial literary criticism. Why is it that we have forgotten the lessons learned from Gayatri Spivak's 1985 essay wherein she argues against the project of “soul making” in her brilliant readings of three nineteenth-century British novels? We need to remind ourselves of her trenchant criticism of a certain kind of Western feminism that sought to privilege white women's burden at the expense of women of color.3 The character literally locked up as the madwoman in the attic (Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) was deployed as a trope for white women imprisoned in stereotypical literary representational economies who were to be liberated by Anglo-American feminist readings. This was the stuff made possible by postcolonial criticism, and one could learn from its lessons. The kinds of “world making” being proffered up in the name of enlarging the canon but wanting to refuse Yeats's admonition that the “center cannot hold,” in encompassing the world through a well-meaning liberal discourse of inclusion (a global multiculturalism), or bringing other worlds into play (mostly at an obtuse angle to the center) seem to me to be yet another version of soul making. Then again, perhaps I am being utopian by wanting to keep alive heterotopia in the face of the normative drive for equivalence, analogy, and modular thinking. The task at hand is difficult and I commend those who are engaging with it, even as I may have disagreements with their modes of engaging with world literatures.However, what discourses around and about world literature do offer us is an emphasis on languages. To be done well, world literature, like comparative literary studies, demands an expertise in more than one language and a familiarity with, hopefully, a couple of others. And, again, hopefully languages outside of Europe. Bringing in languages from the south for an articulation of world literature is essential for a rethinking of center and periphery and major/ minor divisions that haunt world literature. Such expertise may not be able to address the manner in which anthologies have to circulate in a metropole language, often English; but the availability of such anthologies should not mitigate the necessity of learning languages from the south. Postcolonial literary studies' greatest limitation, at least as practiced in U.S. universities, is the emphasis on anglophone literatures. When it comes to South Asia the absence of the many literatures in the various languages from the subcontinent is stark. One may read a bit here and there on some of the stalwarts like Bankim Chandra Chattapadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Ismat Chugtai, Qurratulain Hyder, Rashid Jahan, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Prem Chand (my list here does not include any writer from South India or Sri Lanka, marking my own limitations), but the vast body of literature is left untouched as we read another essay on Rushdie, Desai, Adiga, and Hamid. Thus it is refreshing to read an essay such as Aamir Mufti's “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literature” that severely takes to task Casanova's basic misconception that “non-Western literary cultures make their first effective appearance in world literary space in the era of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century.”4 Mufti's emphasis on an earlier philological revolution that was planetary in nature and that allowed for the entry of much non-Western writings in Persian, Arabic, and other Indian languages through translation, sacred and secular, as literature makes clear that had Casanova taken this circulation as her point of departure, assimilation via the metropole would not be the only model for thinking about how writers from the periphery garner recognition in the center. Rashmi Bhatnagar's work on vernacular ecology offers another interesting challenge to the monopoly of anglophone literatures in U.S. universities and at the MLA. Bhatnagar takes Mir Amman's phrase “Haqiqat urdu zuban ki” (“reality of the Urdu tongue”) as a challenge to rethink the emergence and construction of Urdu as a modern vernacular. In a talk I heard her give she argued for “the problematizing of fundamental assumptions disseminated by Orientalism about the vernaculars of Hindostan in order to open the way for alternative ways of defining the material and human dimensions of vernaculars. It is the beat of vernacular time in Braj, Khari Boli Urdu and modern Hindi that most distinctively and unmistakably enables a vernacular's mode of signification and constitutes the delicate equilibrium of [such a] vernacular ecology.”5 Her published work on Bhartendu Harshchandra, a leading Hindi writer is a case in point.6But such emphasis on vernaculars and world philology rarely if ever surfaces at the MLA. In the most recent session under the Postcolonial Studies in Literature and Culture Division, Ato Quayson took it upon himself to use the session as a forum for his edited anthology, the Cambridge History of Postcolonial Studies. Postcolonial studies is now so central in Western universities that its consolidation in the Cambridge history volumes demands its own slot. Despite the presence of Spivak (not a contributor to the anthology), who did raise the issue of languages, the remaining papers rehashed a traditional literary history of postcolonial studies. It would have been wonderful if there had been a real critical engagement with what the publication and circulation of this anthology means in the debates surrounding the increasing presence of English as a global language. In terms of South Asia we have to leave such explorations in languages other than English to area studies conferences, maybe the American Comparative Literature Association, or conferences focusing on the literatures of South Asia in languages other than English. Even at conferences with the word “postcolonial” in them, South Asia invariably ends up being produced as India in anglophone garb. South Asia at the MLA is rendered legible only in English. So, let's start with the most immediate problem—can we encourage or provide at MLA a space for papers to be read in South Asian languages, at least the more dominant ones? Or even just on works in languages other than in English? How would a session on modern world literatures look like if we had a paper in French, in Arabic, and say in Urdu (on French, Arabic and Urdu works)? The MLA has no policy against papers being presented in this or that language. It leaves it up to the divisions. But what would be the logic of such diverse linguistic incorporations? Given the hegemony of English in the world at large, in the United States, and at the MLA, how could such sessions be run?But even before we get to the formalization of a session, one would have to think about a call for papers that would have to imagine modern world literature “otherwise.” One that would have to be cautious about the worldings of worlds in renditions of imaginative geographies that would seek to render a particular world rather than a singular one. A world not easily encompassed by a focus on other modernities, global modernities, geomodernisms, a cosmopolitan style, and so on. I envisage a call announcing the “death of modernism” in the mode of Spivak's Death of a Discipline, forcing us to reimagine alterity in modernity as anything but a system of alignments undergirded, despite one's best efforts, by European modernism. This is unimaginably difficult, but it is the (im)possibility of the task that should both give us pause and allow us to propose a mode of speculation undergirded by Ben Baer's wonderful proposition of an “Imagine this … ?” rather than the easier “Let's read X alongside Y,” with X more often than not being a canonical or recognizable Western modernist text.7 But even after one issued the call for papers one would have choose the papers, figure out the best way to secure a receptive audience, determine the necessity for translators/translations/distribution of said translations ahead of time, and so forth.So, perhaps I should think small rather than large. What if we merely conceived of modern world literatures in South Asian languages within a comparative framework? That could be done, or could it? To begin with there would have to be, again, a bracketing of the modern itself—are we talking about modern South Asian languages or modern literatures in South Asian languages? Having answered, however tentatively that question, we would be confronted with the internal hegemony of certain languages and literatures—Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu (I am leaving out so much here). I know that as a Bengali who is most familiar with Bengali literature, I have been accused, quite rightly, as being a bangaphile (shades of Casanova here—everything Indian must be routed through Bengal. Guilty as charged!). But, even here the history of a Bengal (prior to partition), then that of West Bengal and East Bengal (after partition), followed by the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, complicates the notion of what we mean when we refer to Bengali literature. South Asia thus poses a challenging task. Sheldon Pollock, who has made a virtuous attempt at a compendium, Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, suggests the enormity of such a task when he notes the incidental nature of the attempt at approaching even a sense of comprehensiveness in an account of the history of the literary history of South Asia.8 In addition, to understand the impact of South Asian literatures in their place of origins, one would have to take into account the history and presence of the various institutions in existence that play a definitive role in describing regional literary and linguistic traditions: the Sahitya Akademi in India, the Pakistan Academy of Letters, which itself was preceded by the Anjuman taraqqi-e-Urdu, the Bamla Academy (Bangladesh), the Nepali bhasa prakasini samiti, originally the Gorkha bhasa prakasini samiti, and so on.9 There is so much to admire in Pollock's anthology, and not just the fact that the first section, titled “Globalizing Literary Cultures,” includes three essays that force us to recognize that there is nothing new or modern about globalization. An essay on Sanskrit literary culture and one on the politics of Persian in precolonial Hindustan is juxtaposed to one titled “The Historical Formation of Indian-English Literature.” Imagine how a session at the MLA would look if we just had these three essays as twenty-minute talks. Maybe such a session requires a conversation between this division and the South Asian Languages and Literatures Discussion Group. Perhaps that is what we may all want to suggest—mutual engagements rather than isolationist turf battles. Thinking comparatively demands intellectual conversations between divisions.Perhaps the conversations we are having in this forum will lead to interdivision collaborations that may further our intellectual engagements with modern comparative literatures within the structure of the MLA. The South Asian Literatures and Languages Discussion Group is really anglophone literature in South Asian guise with a bit of Bollywood on the side and an occasional helping of regional Indian literature. We also have the South Asian Literature Association (SALA) that hosts its annual meeting to coincide with the MLA's. Starting a day earlier and running for just two days, SALA's conference seeks to seduce scholars attending the MLA to come a day earlier to devote themselves to presenting and listening to papers on South Asian literature. But, here again, we face the same dilemma: a striking paucity of representation of literatures in South Asian languages other than English. But it does not have to remain thus. I would urge the MLA to create forums for thinking the subject of literatures in languages from the global South; to imagine South-South dialogues in languages other than English and select European languages; to imagine a creative way to bring various divisions in dialogue and perhaps even require (like they have done with topics) that divisions broaden their horizon in thinking through and about other languages. The South Asian Literatures and Languages Discussion Group existed before the Postcolonial Discussion Group was formed, but we have never actually had a conversation with each other. This is not to suggest that South Asia be privileged all over again but rather that we try to attempt innovative and interesting ways to reimagine what enters the MLA as South Asian literature on the one hand and as postcolonial literature on the other. Very often a paper (on South Asian texts) in sessions run by the Postcolonial Division seems no different from those being read at the South Asian Literature division. I would love to see a combined session that would actually address the subject rehearsed here as the first step toward imagining a comparative engagement with South Asian literatures other than in English. The time seems to be ripe and there appears to be some urgency for us to enlarge our areas of investigation and to try to imagine the possibility of reimagining the project of comparing modern literatures worldwide.