The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in Indiaby Snehal Shingavi

Abstract

The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India, by Snehal Shingavi. London: Anthem, 2013.235 pages. Snehal Shingavi's complex book, The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India, works on two levels. First, it is an analysis of important Indian literary works of the 1930s, centering on Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable (1936), Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), and Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi (1940). Second, and perhaps more important, the book tackles the metacritical question of how these texts can be understood in light of theoretical debates in postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, Marxist historiography, nationalist historiography, Gandhi studies, and Indian English literary studies. Shingavi deftly interweaves these different levels of analysis, producing a dense text that engages on a number of fronts. Shingavi begins by asking a seemingly straightforward question: Why is it such a widespread assumption in Indian and postcolonial literary criticism that the 1930s saw the flourishing of the Gandhian novel? To answer that question, he takes us through a range of debates that have at their heart a critique of the assumption, embedded in postcolonial studies, that Indian nationalism in the pre-Independence decades necessarily led to nationalist-statism and its concomitant exclusions of caste, religious, and other minorities in the early postcolonial decades. Working within this assumption, postcolonial critics draw a causal link from today's marginalization of minorities in India back to the nationalist movement, in which they glimpse this incipient marginalization (in Gandhi's insensitivity toward the demand for separate electorates, for example). But, Shingavi argues, this teleological account does not accurately represent the intellectual richness of the period in question. The nationalist movement did not have one, fixed ideology but a contested and antagonistic field of debate in which the ultimate dominance of the bourgeois nationalist faction was not a given outcome of independence (5). The beliefs of this faction were contested not only by staunch Congress-wallahs but by a radical leftist element as well. The fact that the latter's views did not prevail at Independence is not, Shingavi emphasizes, a reason to deny their contribution to the intellectual and political imaginarles of this period. This is evidenced in the very literature that critics now read as unified in its Gandhianism, but whose texts contain strains of radical critique that either failed to achieve fruition or are reduced to bourgeois nationalism in retrospect. Gandhi, then, is not a marker of a clear political stance but a strategically deployed (6) idea that allows authors to consider the relationship of the universal to the particular, the national to the outcaste, the middle class to the peasant, and the Hindu to the Muslim. Shingavi's first chapter functions as a secondary introduction, situating his analysis within the historical context of the 1930s. He discusses the canonization of Indian writing in English by, among others, K. R. S. Iyengar, vice chancellor of Andhra University, for whom English represented the possibility for a refreshed sense of unity after the euphoria of the nationalist movement had begun to fade. The rise of English also took place in the midst of the language debates in India, which led to the wholesale restructuring of the states according to linguistic boundaries. Many of the advocates of Indian English writing were intellectuals from South India attempting to battle the increasing hegemony of Hindi. Shingavi's exposition of these debates brings new stakes to the question of Indian writing in English, which tends to be cast in postcolonial literary criticism as a simple battle between the protectors of authenticity and the vernaculars on one hand and elite, diasporic writers who favored English on the other. …