UoH, 24th December 2024
What Constitutes
Indian Literature?
The Plurality Question
Indian Literature
OR
Indian Literatures?
How and Why?
pluralities
Languages
Literatures
Forms / Genres (Oral, Performative, Written,…)
Identities
Time periods
Themes
The term Indian
Literature
Term Indian Literatures is itself has been debated, still
under debate
Literature?
India as a nation?
Time period?
Boundaries/Geography/territory?
Features?
Written only?
“Literatures of India” or “Literatures from India” or
“Literary Cultures of India”
This is the main reason for the plural term used here:
Literatures of India: that can hold many contradictory,
contested meanings of literature and of our society.
Principle behind IL
Is this idea of Literatures of India based on an
aggregate principle?
Kannada+Malayalam+Kashmiri+Ao+Santhali+
Sanskrit+ Urdu+……(1. written only, 2. uneven
development of written / print, 3. Sadat Manto, Bhism
Sahani and Kuvempu).
If not, what is the principle behind the ‘unity’ of IL?
What is the relationship between various literatures
that can be called as one IL or many ILs – can there
be a unifying commonality?
Sahitya Akademi: “IL is one although written in
many languages.”
Sharedcommonality
(Bharatavarsha)
Multilingualism
These two are often posited as the
defining features of IL. (SK Das)
Are they? Can they be? Why?
Language-Literature
Connection
Is the language-literature connection necessary or
sufficient to understand literature?
Greek Lit is one written in Greek, English Lit is written in
English. American Lit? Indian Lit? Sanskrit literature?
Indian writing in English?
The inevitable question of nation-language-literature.
Diverse traditions, diverse conceptions, multilingualism.
Linguistic Unity/similarity cannot bring literatures under
one umbrella.
American, British, Australian, Indian English
Urdu/Bangla in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
Certain “pan-Indian” literary
movements.
Movements like Bhakthi that spread across
regions and languages. But the connections need
to be explored. Not just added up. But their
distinctness might get lost. Uneven – Basava and
Mira Bai
Bilingual or multilingual authors, Movements,
interactions between languages – might throw
some overlaps, connections, similarities between
literatures.
In terms of metaphors, symbols, conventions,
myths, tropes, themes…but this can be traced to
all over the continent or beyond (Laila + Majnu)
Some Further Issues
One language – one literature – one
nation is a very recent equation that
does not hold water. Not more than
200 years old. With the coming of
new forms of nation-states in Europe
and elsewhere.
We need to move the focus from
language to people in understanding
Further…
challenges to understanding IL
The Multilingual Field,
The Idea of India,
The Modernity of Gender and Caste,
Global Modernisms,
Canon Making,
Impossibility of an unified linguistic field,
Impossibility of a singular modern,
Impossibility of a standard canon,
Impossibility of an unified, coherent idea of India
foreground the multiplicity and ruptured fragmentation
as the frame through which one could approach the
field of Literatures of India.
The multilingual
question
Buddhist literature in Pali, Ardha Magadhi and
Sanskrit…Same true for Asoka’s inscriptions.
Kalidasa’s plays use Sanskrit, Saurasheni,
Maharashtri and Magadhi in a single play. Different
characters use different languages. Why? Each
were mutually intelligible. Made people who spoke
different languages come together, transcend
barriers, or indeed allowed the characters to speak
the language allowed only for his social status.
Many poets wrote in different languages:Amir
Khusrau, Krishnadevaraya. Vidyapathi: Sanskrit,
Avahatta, and Maithili. Premchand: Urdu and Hindi.
Literary History and
Orientalists
The project of Indian Literary History is the
collaborative project of colonialism, oriental-
Indologists and the nationalist elites of 19th
century.
Starting from Schegel in 1823, it was the
colonial orientalist who began to conceptualize
the idea of a Indian literary history
Schegel 1823
Weber 1852
Winternitz 1907
Caldwell 1913
Nationalist conception of IL
Indian literatures initially only in Sanskrit, and later
accommodating other practices. Later this was
taken over by nationalist thinkers, philosophers,
writers of all hues.
Aurobindo 1920-21
D Mukherjee 1952
DD Kosambi 1956
Suniti Kumar Chatterjee 1956
VK Gokak 1957
Making of the nation and making of its culture,
history, literature. History and culture made
A national identity built through written literature.
Largely in Sanskrit.
Pascale Casanova in one of her essays points out how in
Europe, national literatures were the product of national
rivalries aided by their colonial and capital ambitions.
I often wonder how we could talk about Pakistani
Literature or a Bangladeshi Literature?
The making of the Indian nation as with all other
nations relied heavily on the (un)intended collaborative
work of the European orientalists and Indian nationalists.
And as Raveendran points out,
“theoretically or in terms of a cohesive
methodology, to carry forward a sustained
argument in support of an ontologically
related body of knowledge with a shared
discursive history called Indian Literatures
can only be done by invoking the ideology
of nationalism and the sense of cultural
identity that is central to nationalist
ideology”.
Two Essentials for IL
This could not have happened without
two essentials.
Indian literatures, its
conceptualizations, the canon, can
happen and has happened only
via
Translation
English.
itis translation of Sanskrit texts, religious,
political and literary, in addition to
ethnographical writings that attempted at
connecting disparate people, paved way in
constituting a body of Indian Literature/Indian
culture that went on to represent a continuous
Indian-national culture, a privileged caste-Hindu
culture on which the identity of India as a
nation was/is built. In fact, translation is the
only mode, the only method that brought
disparate languages, disparate people together
as an imagined one.
Translations and IL
Bhartṛhari's poems: Translated into Portuguese in 1651
Vivādārṇavasetu: Translated by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed in 1779
from a Persian translation
Bhagavad Gita: Translated into English by Charles Wilkins in 1785,
Manusmriti: Translated into English by Sir William Jones in 1776
Shakuntala: Translated into English by William Jones 1789 via
German
Mṛcchakatika, Vikramōrvaśīyam, Uttararamacarita,
Malatimadhava, Mudrarakshasa, and Ratnavali: Translated into
English by Horace Hayman Wilson
Persian, Sanskrit, European Languages
Tejaswini Niranjana’s seminal Siting Translation has
furthered this clarity on the power of translation’s
representation that aided the colonizer and how the
“writing-up” (read translation) of field notes into an
ethnographical narrative represents the colonized. In
these realms of power within which translation
operates, my attempt is also to point to the
translation / representation not just by the colonizers
but by the nationalist elites as well – translations of
minoritized people, be it lowered caste and/or
women, ethno-linguistic minorities, and people
whose voices and languages are outside these
realms of power.
This said, translation also works
subversively, it resists and manipulates
power, and provides many alternatives.
Using the myth of “Pandora’s box”, Karin
Littau for example points out how
translation can enable multiple readings,
especially feminist readings of texts and
cultures that are transgressive, in effect,
weaving mythology, pervasive patriarchy,
literary interpretations, historical
happenings and translations together.
Rita Kothari in another context argues how the translation of
Dalit narratives into English has made possible an archive,
has pushed the experiences of caste into a language that
does not have the burden of a ‘memory of caste’. Needless
to mention, this archive is made possible only via translation,
and brings forth the heretofore invisiblized experiences of the
individual. This translation that has made bodies of literary
canon connected to an imagined national history is always in
English is something for us to ruminate. What is that lends
English into a binding national narrative? How have other
languages of India participated in this conceptualization of
Indian Literatures other than being translated into English?
Why is it that all theories of Indian Literatures made possible
only in English?
To me, both translation and English stand as testimonials for
the collective experiences of the community and holds
mirror to the social and political life of our caste-society. This
holding of mirror to our society, to its vagaries has been the
task of translation in English thus locating translation at the
centre of all studies on Indian society. The many possibilities
of translation and comparatism is thus eloquently expressed
by S. Shankar: “just as with translation-as-interpretation, it is
prudent to keep in mind that comparatism can be a form of
knowing-in-solidarity or else of knowing-as-domination
(Shankar 156-157).”
How then can we differently, critically engaged with this
colonial-nationalist-casteist enterprise of Indian Literatures is
a question that is not easy to handle.
