Linterature: In search of a Historian
22 literatures in search of a historian
Shiva Prakash
(Our diverse literatures are becoming unified, ironically through English translations. The debatable quality of translations notwithstanding, leading English language publishers have found market possibilities for such translations. With the woeful decrease in the size of readership for language literatures, translations have opened the gates of a bright future for writers who are making a debut on the pan-Indian and international cultural scene.)
The hegemonic English-speaking intelligentsia here is getting interested in Indian literature translated into English. Just as many languages, dialects, regions, castes, sub-castes, sects, sub-sects were forced into a semblance of unity during British rule, the mindboggling variety of our living literatures is being forced into unity through English.
Even before the trend set in, institutions such as Sahitya Akademi have functioned under the assumption, as Dr S Radhakrishnan says, that Indian Literature is one, though written in many languages.
This is, of course, one of the variants of the Nehruvian theme of unity in diversity , a term which strangely found favour even with radical leftist historian DD Kosambi. However, facts of Indian literatures vaguely visible to us translucently through translations, mainly into English, point to one conclusion amid a swarm of uncertainties: the paradigms of unification, both past and present, are hopelessly outdated.
Thus, another question crops up: Why look for oneness of Indian literatures? As if the integrity of the nation depends on this forced unity. Can we talk about the unity of all religions practised in India? Or of the number of castes and languages? The pragmatic solution is to effect not unification but a harmony based on an authentic recognition of our differences.
Styles and substances of our language literatures are tied up with region-specific issues and challenges, and the diversities further compounded by the uneven development of regions, communities, languages and literatures. For example, Dalit literature, an in thing , is not common to all Indian literatures, though it made its presence powerfully felt first in Marathi, Kannada, Gujarati and later in Telugu, Tamil and Punjabi. One can t say it s a pan-Indian movement.
There is very little Dalitism, for instance, in two of our major literatures, Bengali and Malayalam. Some great works are being written by tribal writers in states with a heavy tribal population, for instance, Lakshman Gaikwad s Marathi classic Uchalya, and the refreshingly new kinds of English poetry from the Khasi hills of Mizoram.
Such expressions of tribal identity are not common to all our literatures. At the same time, the birth of the new women's writing, mainly poetry, now appears to be common to most of our literatures, not that there were no woman writers earlier. In fact there were powerful fiction writers (Mahasweta Devi in Bengali, Vasireddy Sita Devi in Telugu and Triveni in Kannada), and poets (Mahadevi Verma in Hindi, Balamani Amma in Malayalam and Sarojini Naidu in English). But the recent past has seen a proliferation of women poets.
These developments can be subsumed under the rubric, The New Literatures of the Marginalised, all held together by the common theme of re-defining one's collective identity (Dalit/Tribal/Woman) vis-a-vis the images of the marginalised projected in the established literatures of the past (Indian/Hindu/Masculinist).
It is hard to generalise further on today s Indian literatures. In the last two decades there were attempts to challenge the established forms of literary modernisms through new movements. Past attempts have been the Uttaradhunik movement in Bengali, the Bandaya movement in Kannada and Parishkriti in Gujarati. Some talented writers of the post-Seventies generation found great inspiration in these movements. but even these movements, conspicuous in a handful of languages, have become watered down as they are not making a big impact in perceptible trends of writing. Some 60 or so years ago we could pinpoint major, shared trends in our language literatures. But today there is a lot of amorphousness even in individual language literatures. For instance, I find no discernible trends in my own Kannada literature or in a couple of other literatures I half-know. Insiders to several other Indian literatures today have similar impressions. By insiders I mean those who read literatures not in English translation but in the original.
This renaissance of India s marginalised literatures synchronises with the continuation of region-specific modernisms. Novelists Sunil Gangopadhyaya, UR Anantha Murthy and MT Vasudevan Nair, and poets Kunwar Narain, Chandrasekhar Kambar and Dilip Chitre still write in a broadly modernist mode. However, their modernism is subdued.
Dilip Chitre, for instance, is now inspired by medieval Marathi mystical literature, as we see by his fine translations of Tukaram into English. K Sachidanandan, Malayalam poet, is welding the formalist possibilities of various modernism with the enduring values of peoples traditions, including Bhakti poetry. Such attempts are extending possibilities of modernism in interesting ways.
Still, marginalised literatures represent a break from modernisms, past and present. They explore the realities and possibilities of internal colonies of India. The rage against oppression that marked early manifestations of this trend, such as the poems of Namdev Dasal and Siddalingaiah, are replaced by an attitude of rapprochement with realities. The subtle ironies of fiction by powerful Kannada Dalit writer Devanoor Mahadeva are an anguished celebration of living amid conflicts, just as the poetry of Mallika Amar Sheikh (Marathi) and Sanjukta Mukhopadh-yaya are far from the wrath of early Dalit or women s writing.
Further expressions of the marginalised appear to be more multi hued than before. We now know that Dalit identities are also multiple. There are different fronts of Dalits, different tribals with mostly different cultural memories. I am reminded of the incantatory force of a little-known Kannada Dalit poet, Hosur Munisha-mappa, who works into language the vigorous rhythms of hammer blows of his ancestors who were stone-cutters. These lines fro Tamil poet Karikalan, translated by M Vijayalakshmi, speak for all the marginalised:
Expressions such as the above appear to come from a source very different from the framework of tradition that provided points of departure for the broad types of Indian modernism, the formalist and progressive. The poet s grandfather s gall is coterminous with the dramatis personae and locales of internal colonies of Free India which come alive in poets such as Narain Surve in Marathi and Neerav Patel in Gujarati. The presence of such dense words inspire powerful creative idioms that point to the future possibilities of Indian literatures.
New avatars of modernism keep the scene interesting by producing works that meet the demands of good aesthetic forms. The two broad types of modernism, formalist and progressive, were cynical with respect to tradition. However, traditions are now asserting themselves in a new manner. Writers from the newly literalised cast and tribal groups use the rich surviving oral traditions of story and song.
The best of our marginalised writers load every crevice in their writings with ores from such living traditions. In Gujarati, for instance, the poetry and fiction of Kanji Patel are imbued with the riches of folk and marginalised traditions. Aside from this, non modernist young writers such as Vinayachandran (Malayalam), K. Sivareddy (Telugu) and Amitav Gupta (Bengali) are attempting to absorb into their writings the riches of a multiplicity of traditions, classical, folk and modernist. As the world of the urban poet narrows itself down into the angst of the personal erotic and, at other times, into disembodied jumbles of memory, new words are being created and explored by the marginalised writers and a handful of talented non modernists.
Another feature worth mentioning in this context is the return of the dead writers into our midst. Most of these presences do not emerge from the repertoire of the great Indian tradition. Medieval saint poets are frequently seen stalking the fortresses of contemporary literatures. Bhakti poets such as Akka Mahadevi, Basavanna, Meera, Andal, Kabir and Tukaram are very much part of contemporary literary scene. There is also a growing academic interest expressed through translations and interpretations.
In the meantime, the rediscovery and publication of various tribal songs and narratives have now established the fact that our glorified literary canon was just a small island in the ocean of various literary traditions ignored by the mainstream. I have in mind the historic publication of the rich tradition of the Bhils of Gujarat and dozens of tribal epics recently published by Kannada University, Hampi, which are now challenging the established history of literality and poeticality, both native and imported.
Contemporary creative processes are going on not just in a multilingual situation: There is not just plurality but also hierarchy in our literatures. For instance, Indian English writing gets more incentive than great writing in Indian languages. Further, there is also hierarchy among types of writers. Established modern writers whose works are explicable in terms of established academic notions and have greater element of translatability into English and other major languages seem to reach larger audiences whereas many a blossom of less-privileged languages is born to blush unseen and waste his breath on the desert air.
One of the major developments in 20th century Indian literatures is the birth of the genre of literary criticism, probably due to the impact of European traditions. Till then we had several well developed traditions of poetics and many rich literatures, both oral and literary. Though there are some medieval works on poetics in our languages other than Tamil and Sanskrit, the most important poets of the medieval period had little to do with them. They evolved their own poetic which, though not systematically developed in its own right, was built into the creative practice.
During the modernist phase, criticism played a key role in shaping the taste of readers. Now criticism has become divorced from creative practices. Due to the influence of post-structuralist developments, criticism has given way to various forms of theory that has become an autotelic discipline in its own right. The categories of this genre of academic writing has little to do with grassroot realities either of our life or literature. It looks as if our writers are now working in a critical vacuum in spite of the fact that the most talented of our young writers have inbuilt poetics that clearly differentiate them from the modernist mode.
To the best of my knowledge, except in Bengali, no serious critical stocktaking of different Indian modernisms has taken place. Only a superficial form of exchange is going on between literary scholars, ageing modernists and active non-modernist writers. It is, of course, not necessary to have a well-developed aesthetics and poetics as a precondition for an active literary scene.
Our medieval literature reached very great heights in the near absence of poetics. But one wonders whether the imaginative vigour of the masters can be seen among contemporary writers. This should be qualified by saying that present-day India is not medieval India. Nor are there powerful socio-cultural movements like Bhakti movement now. Collective value systems are either crumbling or rendered effete in the new context.
There are not even powerful literary movements. In a situation where there are charlatans in the Church, the Court and the University, young men of the new age are condemned either to create their own systems or be enslaved by the established fashions.
My tentative generalisation can be summed up. Modernist writers are still continuing in an altered form in response to changing conditions. The simultaneous emergence of what I have called the literature of the marginalised (Dalit/Tribal/Feminist) has the potential of emerging as an new alternative, provided these endeavours are properly orchestrated through serious and well-informed criticism and theory. One should not at the same time forget young writers who are developing their own aesthetics akin to their creativity through a dialogue between traditions old and new.
Meanwhile, the literatures of marginalised languages such as Bodo, Maithili and Tulu seem to be undergoing a new renaissance. I have deliberately based this piece Twenty-two Languages in Search of an Historian , on the title of the play Six Characters In Search of An Author. Just as the author loses control over six characters, each one of them trying to author himself, a historian attempting to chronicle all the 22 major literatures is also condemned to lose control over them. In the land of many rivers, many gods and many heroes, a single historian cannot hope to know all the literatures from the inside.
Besides, many other till-now ignored literatures such as Bodo and Tulu and Khagpuri will suddenly burst into his flustered consciousness. Perhaps our many literatures need many chroniclers. Only when these many tales are in full can one sit down and try to orchestrate these confusingly diverse tales.
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