Toward a Vernacular Globalectics: “Minor” Illustrations from South India

Abstract

The protean concept of the Global South, now gaining traction in both academic and political imaginaries, is inflected by multiple significations. Key among those significations is the insight that the Global South is a radical epistemological reorientation, a multilocal context or location to speak from or look at and into the world. Subsequently, this essay mobilizes the concept of the Global South in order to look at the world from the standpoint of vernacular literary cultures produced by Muslims in the South Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Drawing on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's idea of the “globalectical imagination,” I argue that vernacular literary cultures from the Global South allow us to imagine and think about the world in refreshing and powerful ways that usually get muted or short-changed within the paradigms set by the Euro-American normativity. Focusing, by way of illustration, on the greatly underexplored multilingual Tamil and Arabi Malayalam literary texts venerating the Prophet Muhammad, my essay will shed light on how the vernacular presents us with a “glocal” perspective: even as the vernacular culture grounds itself firmly in the local, it invariably transcends the local specificities in order to forge translocal, transregional, transnational and global connections and affiliations. The essay thus ventures a “vernacular globalectics” in the Global South with which to see the world and its various literatures contextually and relationally rather than unilocally and exclusively as is often the case in the regnant models for literary study in our times, including the meta-category of “world literature.”