The second empire
K Sachidanandan
(Do we need Western theories to understand and interpret the literatures of India! What about creative writing itself, do we need to mimic Western models, genres and movements so that we may come up with upmarket literary products readily cheered, accepted, awarded and extolled by the West? )
I can hear the counter questions. Is it possible or even desirable to isolate ourselves entirely from the rest of the world especially at a time when modern technologies of communication have levelled distances and brought communities in closer contact with one another? What scope does the concept of identity have in the age of globalisation and the internet!
Let us not forget the lessons of our colonial experience. The colonial intervention was a major blow to Indian literatures in that it privileged Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic over the modern Indian languages. Earlier, a poet Iike Kabir had found Sanskrit the stagnant water of the Lord s private well while the spoken language was the rippling water of the running stream . This medieval perception was subverted by the Orientalists of the West who drew on a completely invented tradition to legitimise and endorse modernisation .
Lord Minto ignored all literatures in modern Indian languages to assert that science and literature in India were in a progressive state of decay . The General Council of Education in India found Indian literatures to be profane , immoral and impure and Sir Richard Temple found them scanty and obsolete . Maurice Winternitz and Albrecht Weber, the first historians of Indian literature, also excluded the living literatures of India from their histories. Thus began the colonial project for the creation of a national literature for India through translations of Sanskrit and Arabic classics into English and of the self-styled English classics into Indian languages.
Charles Trevelyan had found the diversity among languages to be one of the greatest existing obstacles to improvement in India . The British with their mono lingual (and mono religious) culture were unable to comprehend the multi lingual (and multi religious) culture of India.
The votaries of Indian literature in English such as Salman Rushdie and Khushwant Singh who look down upon three millennia of creative literature in India written in different languages are the true inheritors of this colonial perception of the multiplicity of languages as an obstacle rather than a possibility.
This coincides with the perception of the ruling classes of India who even in the post colonial days are committed to impose a single language on India as national language while all our languages are equally and truly national. This paranoiac obsession with a national language is but an extension of the attempt to manufacture an artificial, standardised version of Indian culture, bulldozing the diversity that is the very source of our cultural richness.
The colonial mono lingual models have dominated our literary historiography even in the post colonial period.
Our languages have not existed as mutually exclusive entities; at times one language has slowly emerged from the shadow of another, as Malayalam has from Tamil; at times several languages have coalesced into one another and gradually got standardised, as in the case of Hindi.
There have been frequent border crossings among languages; many of our authors, why even texts, have been multi lingual. It is difficult to place Kabir, Mira, Nanak or Namdev with any certainty in a particular linguistic tradition.
Again the Western models of periodisation, such as the classical, the romantic, the modern and post modern, can be imposed on Indian literatures only with disastrous results as several trends co-exist at any specific moment of history in every language and these have an organic relationship with the evolution of different genres in that language.
Even the different literary genres in the languages can hardly find a parallel in the Western discourse from Kashmiri Vakh, Kannada Vachana and Marathi Abhang to Urdu Ghazal, Punjabi Kissa and Malayalam Kilippattu.
The novel and short story are supposed to have come to India from the West while we have our own narrative forms like the folk ballads, the epics, the Jataka tales, the Vikramaditya tales, the Panchatantra and Kadambari with their own narrative structures. The late Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, the great Malayalam novelist, used to claim, reasonably, that his masterpiece Kayar closely followed the structure of the Mahabharata, in its best practitioners from Fakir Mohan Senapati, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Govardhanram and CV Raman Pillai to Sivaram Karanth, Thakazhi, Manik Banerjee, Tarashankar Banerjee, Gopinath Mohanty, Phaneeshwar Nath Renu, Premchand, Krishna Sobti, Nirmal Verma, OV Vijayan, Bhalchandra Nemade, Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya, UR Anantha Murthy and others, the art of fiction has acquired a totally national/regional character of its own having little to do with Western models.
This cultural amnesia becomes all the more visible in the field of literary theory. I am referring not only to the rich tradition of linguistics and poetics that has inspired Western linguists like Wittgenstein and Saussure especially in languages such as Sanskrit, (for example, Natyashastra) TamiI (for example, Tholkappiyam) and Kannada (for example, Kavirajamarga) which at least have found some intelligent followers in modern India, I am referring to an alternative poetics that I hold is implied in Indian literary practice and has had an almost unbroken development right from the tribal and Buddha-Jaina literatures through Bhakti poetry to the literature of the anti colonial and anti feudal struggles and contemporary subaltern writing by the Dalits, women, tribals and other marginalised sections of the society.
I have, elsewhere called this a sramana poetics a poetics of the have-nots as against the brahmana poetics of the elite. This poetics that springs from an egalitarian vision of society and an open, experimental attitude to language and form has gone on producing new modes of popular articulation throughout the centuries, accommodating the dialects and negotiating the contradictions of people s lives in true democratic spirit.
There is not a single movement or text in Indian literature whose genesis, evolution and structure cannot be explained without resorting to Western paradigms. I have no hesitation in blaming the English departments of Indian colleges and universities of which I was also a part until, disenchanted, I walked out of it for having sustained the colonial agenda even after the colonisers have left.
Other languages also have often been unconscious collaborators in this conspiracy to import all the latest fashions in Western theory into India right from semantics and semiotics to structuralism, genealogy and deconstruction.
I am not contesting the radical potential of the theories of Bakhtin, Barthes, Derrida or Foucault in the Western context; only our dependence on the Western theories exposes the failure of our academics to grasp the principles of our own literary practice.
The process of globalisation , a euphemism for Americanisation and Coca-colonisation, has further deepened the crisis. Globalisation, in the field of culture, is but a monologue of power that reasserts colonial imaginaries through discourses of domination. It induces cultural amnesia in its subjects who suddenly forget their rich pre-colonial past and begin to mimic the West. Lifestyles, dress codes, food habits and behavioral norms are imported, along with modes of thought and systems of knowledge resulting in standardisation, homogeneity and non articulation.
Globalisation promotes epistemic violence that tends to annihilate opposing world views, cosmologies and indigenous systems of knowledge and articulation, leading the social and historical mutilation of the colonised. This is often accomplished through the media that equates the modern with the Western and promotes a carnival of the exotic that ultimately creates a discontented, schizophrenic people. This power-knowledge game is played through a willing culture-industry that manufactures marketable forms of life and art.
The language of this game is, of course, English that is already threatening to wipe out our languages.
It is for us to turn this game in our favour by using new technologies to empower our languages, and by persuading the yet uncolonised minority of our intellectuals and academics to fight for cultural identity linguistic diversity where no language dominates any other.
This is not an argument for a regressive nativism but is a plea for the retrieval of cultural memory, for the freedom of each language and culture to determine and choose what is best for its health and growth and not to take commands.
The beginning of the passing millennium witnessed the birth-throws of our languages; the end seems to be witnessing their pangs of death. It is up to us to see that the new millennium ensures their revival and reinforcement as the repositories of our deepest feelings, thoughts, sensibilities, world views and ethical and aesthetic perceptions; in short, of our culture.
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