Voice and Perception in Transcultural Realities: The Case of India

Abstract

In the wake of Gerard Genette’s influential analysis of Narrative Discourse (1980 1972), the distinction of ‘voice’ and ‘perception’ – or, as Genette has it, between ‘narration’ (who speaks?) and ‘focalisation’ (who perceives, sees, hears, smells?) – has long been acknowledged as marking two distinct but interrelated basic functions of narrative which can be traced in the formal features of verbal and even nonverbal narrative texts (cf. Mellmann 2010, 135-8). At the same time, and on a more general note, cultural studies and postcolonial studies have frequently taken recourse to ‘voice’ and ‘perception’ when addressing questions of authority and (dis-)empowerment on the one hand and residual personal experience in the face of overwhelming social and cultural forces on the other. It is this wider view that the present special issue of ZAA seeks to adopt while insisting on the analytical advantage of ‘voice’ and ‘perception’ as formal categories in order to gain a more specific access to cultural processes. The works under discussion here often adopt already existing literary voices and traditions and use them to create novel impressions and perceptions of ‘Indian culture.’ This volume’s focus on India is a step into the direction of ‘localising’ literary traditions and their impact on the perception of the particular place and cultural milieu that they are concerned with. In fact, the articles share an interest in the re-workings of inherited – at times colonial – literary models that Indian poets, novelists and dramatists appropriate and use to counter preconceived perceptions of Indian culture and society. Our contributors have identified perceptions of Indian culture on the one hand, and Indian readings of Western culture on the other, in a variety of texts over a range of literary periods. One look at the colonial period in Indian history undoubtedly reveals that literature was involved in creating authoritative images of the ‘other’ culture, images consumed by British and Indian readerships alike. However, it is our contention here, that it is not only Orientalism (Said 1978) that told narratives of the East and influenced Western perceptions of India, but that Indian understandings of Western culture need to be foregrounded, too. Today, Indian ways of perception such as, for example, disseminated by the Bollywood film industry but also by the popular genre of the Indian novel in English, have entered the global mainstream.