Introduction: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures

Abstract

In accepting the invitation from Professor Thomas O. Beebee in 2013 to edit a special issue of Comparative Literature Studies (CLS) on comparative South Asian literatures, we were fully aware of the challenges involved. Among other things, we were responding to a region that is comprised of seven nations with a population of over two billion people of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds, who speak hundreds of languages that include nearly two dozen major living literary traditions. Calling major Indian languages “dialects,” as some folks in the West do breezily, only betrays ignorance. While for many scholars, “vernacular” (from Latin, vernae, domestic slaves) is still an acceptable term for South Asian languages, others would remind us of its condescending connotation in British colonial history that implicitly obviated the substantive literary trajectory of the subcontinent's regional languages. Both of us, the guest editors, hail from India, which forms a huge part of South Asia, with our respective mother tongue domains of Punjabi and Tamil set apart geopolitically from each other by 1,500 to 2,000 miles in India and Pakistan in the Northwest for Punjabi and Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka in the South for Tamil. Ironically, we were not able to attract serious contributions for CLS focused on either Punjabi or Tamil. Incidentally, these two languages belong to two distinct language groups—Indo-European and Dravidian, respectively—which have little in common other than some shared Sanskritic influences through Hindu scriptures and religious practice.Also, we have both lived in the United States for long years and been situated within the academy in similar but distinctive ways—with a range of intellectual interests in both South Asia and North America. As teacher-scholars of literature, we have both been involved in praxis and advocacy for the inclusion of South Asian and South Asian American writings in US curricula—both from within and outside an organization such as the South Asian Literary Association (SALA). Like other South Asianists, we too have been guilty of using Indian English texts to represent all of India in our courses and academic discourses. So, is our deliberate choice to focus this CLS special issue almost exclusively on bhasha literatures (South Asian literatures in languages other than English) an act of penance? We view it instead as an attempt to bring the much-needed balance, a corrective, to our understandings of South Asia and its diverse cultures and literatures. Imagine all of Europe (or even Western Europe) as one country with a dozen national languages and you barely get a glimpse of the chaos and excitement India represents to its residents (and others) linguistically and culturally on a daily basis. Yes, Indians at home too experience the tensions between English and bhasha literatures in creative, readership, and pedagogical contexts, similar to the ones experienced by self-conscious members of the diaspora in North America and elsewhere. However, such tensions at home have a very different affect and effect because of the richly nuanced and widespread patterns of bilingualism and multilingualism among writers, scholars, and ordinary citizens.As indicated, the linguistic diversity of South Asia is mind-boggling indeed, and yet communication issues among its seven nations (including the three major ones, viz., India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) have never been hampered by that linguistic complexity. If in Bernard Shaw's famous quip, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language,” South Asian peoples at home and abroad are often brought together by the many languages and cuisines they have in common. At the same time, while many essays chosen for inclusion in this special issue analyze literatures in languages such as Urdu and Bengali that cut across national borders in South Asia, almost all our essays are by and large examples of how comparative literature is practiced within the Indian context, including the context of British Colonial India which included what is South Asia today within one political unit until 1947. Thus, in the discussions we offer suggestively in our editorial essay and in greater depth in the eleven essays that follow, our contributors and we speak primarily to the Indian cultural situation and metonymically to the larger South Asian context (Auritro Majumder's cross-border consideration of Bengali literature in West Bengal and Bangladesh is one exception in this volume). And while some of the issues raised in this volume will surely find meaningful parallels in Sri Lanka, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, we have no intention of minimizing the considerable differences that mark each national context within South Asia.Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam—these are just some of the major languages spoken and written in India and all of them have thriving literary cultures that go back a thousand or more years. Each of these eleven literatures has arguably the heft of literary expression and history in any one major European language. The Indian Constitution recognizes 22 scheduled languages and the 2001 Census records 122 major languages and 1,599 other languages. Additionally, oral and literary traditions thrive in almost all South Asian languages in the diasporic communities across the globe—be it Bhojpuri in Mauritius, Hindi in Fiji, Punjabi in Vancouver, British Columbia, or Southall, London, or Tamil in Toronto or Singapore. Yet, within the Western academy and literature departments in particular, there are very few programs that focus on languages and literatures of South Asia. Many students seeking to learn South Asian languages and housed in area studies programs might be more focused on language fluency for purposes of field work or intelligence gathering rather than literary and aesthetic aspects of any South Asian language. In addition, Anglophone Indian literature (Indian English Literature) has had a strong presence in English department curricula in India and across North America and Europe. The emergence of postcolonial studies as a field and its institutionalization across Western academia in the last thirty years, coupled with the flow of graduate students from South Asian nations for language and literary study, has further contributed to South Asian Anglophone writing becoming overrepresented in scholarship and curricula.1Even back in India, English occupies a vexed position. Nearly seventy years after the British left the Indian subcontinent and despite growing chauvinisms of many varieties, the English language remains an important and integral part of Indian life. After experiencing significant setbacks in the 1960s and the 1970s in some parts of India such as Bihar and Gujarat, interest in learning English as the business language has revived significantly as a result of the globalization phenomenon. While some estimates suggest that over 20 percent of India's population are conversant with English at some level, it is reasonable to assume that at least 5 percent of the population (almost seventy million people- that is, double the population of Canada and three times that of Australia) have considerable, even near-native, fluency in English. Even more remarkable is the continued energy and diversity of contemporary Indian writing in English at home and in the diaspora. The success in 1981 of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, often noted for its magical realism, has been repeated many times over by writers as different from Rushdie as one writer can be from another. Consider, for instance, the enthusiastic response in India and elsewhere to Arundhati Roy's lyrical God of Small Things or Vikram Seth's intricately realistic A Suitable Boy. With the expanding circle of South Asian diaspora in many parts of the world, it would be difficult to generalize about the phenomenon of new South Asian writing in any simple, formulaic terms. Apart from the fact that most such works fulfill a certain Western yearning for the exotic and some of them get included in the curriculum to serve multicultural/cross-cultural goals, these writers have very little in common. Some of these writers would be, in Parminder Bhachu's phrasing, “twice-born migrants,” having arrived in the United Kingdom or North America, for example, after their family's sojourns for a generation or two in Africa, Fiji, or the Caribbean.2In considering the apparent pervasiveness of English in India today, many would argue that Thomas Babington Macaulay did succeed in India in his colonial project (laid out in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education”3) of creating “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” As a result of his fiat for Indian education, which he couched in pseudo democratic terms, upper class and caste Indians were systematically educated in English language and literature at the expense of their education in native languages. Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest4 traces the evolution of literary study in the imperial context to emphasize that literary study became one of the ideological state apparatuses by which English imperial control expanded on the subcontinent. We face the consequences of that effective colonial policy to this day. For many contemporary bhasha writers, the glamor and global reach of English language writing as well as the awards and book contracts given to Rushdie, Roy, and Seth, speak to the continued hegemony of English and raise concerns about the persistence of colonial legacies and attitudes. In noting that the dominance of Indian English writing on the global stage is not just because of awards and publishing advances, Mahesh Elkunchwar, an eminent Marathi author, writes: “The reason for this bias [against bhasha writers] is simple. Marathi (or any other Indian language, for that matter) although spoken by eighty million people, is like all Indian languages, an unimportant language in the world order. Bhashas remain unimportant not because literature of any merit is not produced in them. They are unimportant because the people who speak them are unimportant.”5This debate between Indian English writing and bhasha writing has raged since the 1940s and reached its peak in the 1970s and the 1980s.6 Of course, Indian English writing too has not always had a position of privilege on the Indian literary scene. Arguably, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Mulk Raj Anand, who started writing in the 1930s, had to struggle for recognition until K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's pioneering study Indian Writing in English (1962, 1973) helped to identify this body of writing as significant and worthy of scholarly attention. In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars like V. K. Gokak, Krishna Kriplani, Umashankar Joshi, C.D. Narasimhaiah, and Sujit Mukherjee also argued about whether there was a singular national cultural sensibility manifested in multiple regional literatures in various languages, an idea that finds its distinctive expression in Mini Chandran's essay on translations in this volume.7 Mukherjee in particular urged Indian critics to develop perspectives and tools to evaluate works in Indian literature regardless of the language in which they were written—examples of which are found aplenty in Meenakshi Mukherjee's extended and influential scholarship, in books such as Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (1985) and The Imperishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (2003). Sujit Mukherjee stressed the need for Indian scholars and literary historians to focus on the middle ground between the narrowly regional and the international so that mediating methodologies can emerge. As he noted, “In their anxiety to prove the authenticity of a particular regional literature, its historians tend to stress its autonomy by overlooking the stimulus this literature may have received from neighboring languages and literatures … By underplaying the role of cross-fertilization in our literary culture, our historians have misread the history of literature in every language” (20).8 And that stimulus might also have come from English language and literature—a point Alok Bhalla too suggests in the opening essay for this volume.The establishment of the Sahitya Akademi in 1954 was, according to Sheldon Pollock, motivated by the need to carve a collective national identity. To that end, “the Akademi adopted as its motto ‘Indian literature is one though written in many languages.’”9 The debate also included concerns about English being a foreign language, not an Indian one. Several authors who lived in India and wrote in English such as P. Lal, Keshav Malik, and Shashi Deshpande vehemently disagreed with the notion that English is not an Indian language and with assertions that somehow Indian English writers were out of touch with Indian reality. For Lal, founder of the Calcutta Writers Workshop, English was the language of Indian cosmopolitanism. As his obituary in The Economist (November 10, 2010) noted, “English in India, [Lal] believed, had become a new language, with its own worth and its own pride. It did not have to parade in a Western suit, just as he refused to, getting barred from the Calcutta Club for wearing pajamapanjabi as usual.”10The tension between bhasha and Indian English writers at home has been complicated in the past three decades by the dominance of successful South Asian writers in the diaspora and more broadly in the West. In 1997, among the scores of publications that marked the fiftieth anniversary of independence for both India and Pakistan, Salman Rushdie edited a special issue of New Yorker magazine, which grew quickly into the Vintage Anthology of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, edited by Rushdie and Elizabeth West. In the Introduction, Rushdie made a very controversial statement: “The prose writing created in this period by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the 18 ‘recognised’ languages of India … and this still burgeoning Indo-Anglian literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.”11 Many literary writers and bhasha writers were quite shocked by this evaluation by a writer who read little directly in any Indian language. They found in Rushdie's breezy evaluation an ironical echo of the colonial attitudes displayed by Macaulay in the aforementioned “Minute.” In 1835, Macaulay had condescendingly declared, “I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”12 However, unlike Macaulay, Rushdie in 1997 was very keen to find and read the bhasha literary works in readable and imaginative translations, but such translations were not easy to find and he was not free to commission new translations. In fact, in an interview with Swapan Dasgupta (India Today, July 14, 1997), Rushdie makes it clear that in being so provocative, he was in fact challenging other Indian editors and writers to do something to remedy this serious paucity of good translations and produce a counter-anthology to prove him wrong: “Doesn't mean that there are no great writers in other languages. I am aware that it is a conclusion that will raise eyebrows and that people will disagree with it. Let them do so. All I am saying is that this was arrived at not polemically and not for some mean-spirited desire to denigrate local languages but on the basis of the writing that I read, it was my conclusion. I would only say that if someone disagrees with the conclusion, let them put together another anthology.”13 And yet, both in our teaching and scholarship, focusing exclusively on Indian English writing would convey a skewed impression of South Asia and South Asians. Clearly, there is an urgent need to generate more high-quality translations such as A. K. Ramanujan's edition of U. R. Anantha Murthy's Samskara. Despite the persistent and heroic efforts over the years by journals such as Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Vagartha, Chandrabhaga, Mahfil (Journal of South Asian Literature), South Asian Review, Re-Markings, and Kavya Bharati, very little of the very best in bhasha writing sees the light of day in English to this day.At the same time, with the increasing pace of globalization and migration as well as the role of cyber communications from online publication platforms to social media, the language debate has begun to take a different turn in the last decade or so. With English firmly established as the language of global commercial and cultural communication, both Indian English and bhasha writing have become increasingly tied to anxieties over national identity in the face of increased globalization. As South Asian nations have embraced globalization in various degrees and eagerly seek foreign investments in their economies, they have also become increasingly nativist in their approaches to safeguarding national culture along linguistic and religious lines. In India, for example, some teachers and scholars have felt the need to lace their laudable goals of studying Sanskrit poetics and developing indigenous critical approaches to reading and interpretation with narrow and hateful Hindutva ideologies. Thus, resistance to Western media and art forms continues to grow in many forms and forums, even as the population that seeks English language fluency as a means to economic advancement and global advantage continues to expand at the same time. Several writers in India and Pakistan including Aravind Adiga, Mohammad Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid have turned their attention to the dark side of globalization in their works. Globalization has created a reading public that has significant disposable income as well as literacy in English but not much of an appetite for literary fiction. Not only has the South Asian urban middle class reading public of the new millennium embraced e-books and digital devices for reading, they have also sought mass-market fiction, including works by Amish Tripathi, Chetan Bhagat, and others. India and Pakistan have also seen a proliferation of literary festivals in their metropolitan centers that draw large crowds to star-studded events.In most parts of the world, the word “communal” has many positive meanings that evoke the power and appeal of life in a community, however defined. It may indicate a sense of the harmony and nourishment an individual experiences in a village or an urban neighborhood, or conjure up Benedict Anderson's “imagined community,” or loop in the suggestiveness of an African saying such as “It takes a village to raise a child.” But in India, this good word has garnered a long history of negative connotations that raise the specters of suspicion and mistrust, prejudice and racism, sectarian hatred and violence. While Critical Race Theory would allow us to find fascinating parallels between the history of racism and white supremacy in North America and communalist discourses in South Asia, the distinctions between the historical formations of, say, Muslims in India and African Americans in the United States are equally significant. The Muslims arrived in India not as unwilling slaves but as conquerors and invaders and ruled the country, sometimes with an iron hand, for centuries before India was gradually taken over by the British during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the large Muslim population of India (and South Asia) today is made up almost entirely of poor and low-caste Hindus who had converted to Islam to escape the harshness of the Hindu caste system that caused untold suffering for sundry groups signaled collectively as Shudras, Untouchables, or Dalits (see Sreya Chatterjee's contribution in this volume for one iteration of caste in contemporary India's literary expression). Further, “communalism” in the Indian subcontinent has been shaped as much by the policies and actions of the colonial and postcolonial rulers, as by historical perceptions and conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. As Gyanendra Pandey reminds us, under the British, “communalism” grew as a colonial construct that enabled state control in the guise of mediating religious divisions. According to Pandey, “Communalism … is a form of colonialist knowledge … the paradox is that the nationalists have more than anyone else … propagate[d] its use.”14Simultaneously with the Freedom Movement between the two World Wars led by M. K. Gandhi and others, Hindu-centered ideologies were being shaped by figures such V. D. Savarkar, who had advocated his own version of the “two-nation theory” in his essay “Hindutva” (1923): “We Hindus are bound together not only by the love we bear to a common fatherland and by the blood that courses through our veins … but also by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization—our Hindu culture … we are one because we are a nation, a race and own a common Sanskriti (civilization).”15 In 1937, in his presidential address to the open session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad, Savarkar declared: “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main—the Hindus and the Muslims.”16 In the 1930s, Chaudhry Rahmet Ali and poet Mohammed Iqbal had begun to conceptualize a separate federation for Muslims that morphed into the “two-nation” thesis espoused by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leading eventually to his demand for Pakistan. Empathizing with the alienation that Muslims, like Dalits, would experience in a Hindu majority India, the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar too supported the case for a separate Muslim homeland in his monograph, Thoughts on Pakistan (1941).17Such divisiveness over religion has over the decades bolstered cultural discourses that involve communalization of language and literature—especially in relation to Urdu and Hindi, as reflected in the life and career of the literary giant Munshi Premchand, who receives attention in the essays by Sumanyu Satpathy and Krupa Shandilya in this volume.18 In fact, Satpathy's essay provides a historical glimpse into the communalist debates in colonial British India that took place in many regions of India outside the geopolitical domains of Hindi and Urdu languages to infect and inflect official policies on language and script throughout India.Between West Pakistan and East Pakistan, fault lines on culture and language had begun to emerge as early as 1952, eventually unraveling the “two-nation” theory in the 1971 emergence of Bangladesh as an independent nation. The still nascent nationalist discourses based in religion began to fall apart in the 1950s, when West Pakistan reiterated its imposition of Urdu as the official language of East Pakistan, whose population deeply cherished Bengali language and culture.19 In India, the decision under Jawaharlal Nehru to reorganize states along linguistic lines but his singular refusal to grant a linguistic state in the Punjab led to much alienation and turmoil in the state in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the political decisions on how the Punjab was partitioned in 1966, based on the intense communalization of Punjabi and Hindi in the 1950s and on misleading mother-tongue census figures, may have laid the foundation for the much bigger challenges of rebellion and violence the region faced in the 1980s and 1990s—which, in turn, have had major negative consequences for the whole nation.20We never had the expectation that essays we selected for this special issue would address all of the questions we had in mind when we began our work as Guest Editors in 2013-14. We solicited essays from scholars working in South Asia and in North America whose work focused on modern South Asian literatures from roughly 1850 to the present. We welcomed essays that would cover topics with reference to any particular national literature and others that would cut across national borders. Keeping comparative literature paradigms and approaches in mind, we asked contributors to consider literary texts in South Asian regional languages, the bhasha literatures, in relation to one another along multiple arcs and trajectories, including literary genres and modes of writing, movements, influences, as well as considerations of gender, caste, class, religious divides, and minority consciousness. We encouraged contributors to consider neglected literary canons/traditions; “minority” literatures; Muslim Literary Cultures; “postcolonialism” in non-Anglophone writings; religion and literature; the interplay between English language and indigenous literary traditions; South Asian languages and diasporic cultures; translation theories and praxis. We were disappointed that we did not receive an essay offering a serious evaluation of the important integrative pan-Indian work associated with the name of Sisir Kumar Das.21 Of the numerous submissions we received, those chosen for inclusion here engage in depth and breadth with the many historical, ideological, and methodological challenges of comparative literary work in South Asian languages, often using critical points of view from bhasha sources.Even as many South Asian languages are distinctive, with substantive literary traditions all their own, the writers in these languages share a common repository of myths, legends, and aesthetics, which the Pakistani writer Intizar Husain, for example, has highlighted in so many of his essays and interviews and which he explores in his short stories and novels. Alok Bhalla's essay, “Silence, Sympathy, and Violence,” which was delivered as the Ahmed Ali Lecture in March 2015 at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi, offers an engaging, almost lyrical, meditation on the perennial issues of good and evil, alienation and violence, by commenting on selected episodes from the Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana and by analyzing a fascinating piece of conversation that takes place between an unnamed old Muslim man and Ramachandra Gandhi, a younger Hindu philosopher. Among other things, Bhalla explores the artist's interpretation of two key scenes in Ramayana and then examines the relevance of the epic in the context of contemporary political events (such as the December 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid) where the worship of Rama buttresses fundamentalist ideologies promoting “communal” violence. This essay conveys many insights on language and human behavior, even as it reminds us that the story of Rama has numerous iterations and manifestations across South Asia and in its diaspora and how the narrative connects with literary and oral texts in many languages across centuries. With Sumanyu Satpathy's “War of Words,” we move from human propensities to a historical examination of multipronged linguistic controversies in Eastern India. Satpathy shares his extensive research in Odia archives to establish how the communalization of languages such as Hindi and Urdu was never a thing apart, that it was part of a complicated pattern of colonial policy and scholarly discourses involving other Indian languages and scripts. Satpathy's detailed examination of such debates encompasses how Fakir Mohan Senapati and Premchand helped consolidate literary identity of Odia and Hindi respectively through their works. The essay provides an acknowledgment of India's cultural unity despite its linguistic diversity, underscoring the need to evolve a more integrative methodology to “do” comparative literature in South Asia. Munshi Premchand (aka Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, 1880–1936) reappears in Krupa Shandilya's essay “The Widow, the Wife, and the Courtesan” in a very different context. Although the communal and commercial tensions that marked the relationship between Urdu and Hindi do find a mention in Shandilya's essay (Premchand wrote in both languages), she is concerned primarily with questions of gender and genre across multiple linguistic traditions. Comparing social reformist novels in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu, Shandilya views Premchand's Hindi novel, Sevasadan (1917) (The House of Service), as critiquing the institution of marriage much like the Bengali widow remarriage novels. For Shandilya, Premchand's novel espouses a specifically Gandhian nationalist ideology making space for a new figure—the Indian woman, rather than the Hindu woman. Sevasadan, then, unlike Bengali and Urdu social reform novels, offers a nationalist solution to the question of social reform. However, Shandilya avers, this solution remains unrealized within the scope of the novel since the birth of the nation is inhibited by the restrictive mores of Hindu society.The essays by Jennifer Dubrow, Madhu Singh, and Anjali Gera Roy are concerned more with form and technique in fiction than with thematic and ideological undercurrents of literary discourses. Building on the work of Meenakshi Mukherjee and others, Dubrow's essay argues that the novel emerged in South Asia not as an import from Europe, but rather as the product of multiple sources and as a genre capable of fulfilling a distinct function. Thus the novel as a genre arose in colonial India because of its ability to hold divergent points of view and to subtly critique the British government. Focusing on two early Urdu novels, Nazir Ahmad's Mirāt ul-'Arūs (1869) (The Bride's Mirror) and Ratan Nath Sarshar's Fasāna-e Āzād (1878–1883) (The Tale of Azad), Dubrow examines how novelists used techniques such as the “contrasting character pair” to explore irreconcilable problems under colonial rule. She views this strategy to represent one of the ways in which early bhasha novelists fashioned the novel genre as a form uniquely suited t