Global South Asia

South Asian Literatures and the World

Madhurima Chakraborty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032160207
• eBook ISBN: 9781000537833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Literature

This book collects essays that take on the excavatory, critical, and generative work of rethinking the relationship between South Asia and the world. In examining what kind of new relationships are uncovered between these two geopolitical groupings, the chapters in this book argue that South Asian literature and literary criticism can reframe the common narrative of the powerful Global North and a disenfranchised Global South. This is not always a comforting reframing since it must account for the oppressive roles that South Asian nations sometimes play in regional and intranational theatres.

Through myriad disciplinary groundings, theoretical approaches, and objects of study, the essays in this book collectively argue that South Asian literature allows us to think more critically about both the liberatory possibilities of South Asia as a grouping (of nations but also of ideas and aesthetics) as well as the elisions that may happen under such categorization.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the South Asia Review.

Introduction: South Asian Literature and the World

Madhurima Chakraborty

Global South Asia: South Asian Literatures and the World, via a special issue of South Asian Review, was inspired by the 2019 South Asian Literary Association annual meeting that I was fortunate enough to co-chair with Dr. Nalini Iyer. Embedded in the conference theme that year—South Asian Literatures in the World—was also the ghost of its converse, which is to say the world in South Asian literatures. The “world” is of course polysemic, at once referring to, potentially, the publishing world, which may make demands about what textual worlds, or fictive and creative universes generated by individual texts, get narrated. These may in turn determine how the world, that is, a multinational audience, will imagine South Asia.

The conference was able to address the above multivalence of “the world” in relationship to South Asian Literature in a way that only a conference can—through the combination of scholarship, discussions with publishers and editors, panels on professionalization that addressed what it meant to be South Asianists predominantly in departments where such faculty are guaranteed to be in the minority (another word with multiple, applicable meanings in this context), etc. It became increasingly clear that the idea of South Asian literature in the world was of interest to the community of literary critics gathered there, who had come not just to Chicago for the conference but also more generally to South Asian literary studies by negotiating different categories that the world has cast and shaped for us, sometimes much before our entry into the field, and that we must nonetheless negotiate, categories such as identity politics, disinterested scholarship, objectivity, and aestheticism.

In this, “the world” is, therefore, best understood as part of Edward Said’s triad of the world, the text, and the critic, three mutually determining rather than merely influencing poles. If, for Said, “Words and texts are so much of the world that their effectiveness, in some cases even their use, are matters having to do with ownership, authority, power, and the imposition of force,” (Said 1983, 48), then it follows that not just criticism, but the very site of the production of criticism—a conference, say—is beholden to the same demands of power and authority. For instance, in 2018, the Indian government denied visas, wholesale, to Pakistani scholars who were hoping to travel to New Delhi for the Association for Asian Studies conference at Ashoka University. This sweeping dismissal was borne out of the Hindutva politics that underlies the Indian central government and is part of the same global anti-Muslim bigotry that prevented scholars from Pakistan and Bangladesh from traveling to our own conference in Chicago, who, like their colleagues months before, were denied travel visas. It is impossible to calculate how much our understanding and knowledge in areas such as Asian studies or South Asian literature has been stunted by the absence of diverse scholarly voices in these sites of ostensible knowledge production. So, for instance, I have no doubt that the dominance of India in South Asian academic thought, to the absolute detriment of other regional objects and subjects of study and consequently to the field itself, will remain unchallenged if others are not permitted to interlocute or even interrupt.

Given both the discussions that happened at the conference as well as the material contingencies that undergirded it, what emerged from the conference was the need to continue thinking through the possibilities and, perhaps even more importantly, the limits of South Asia as a structuring, epistemological collectivity; such a need has subsequently fueled the essays collected in this collection. To the extent that the essays here elaborate on the possibilities of South Asia, they think through global connections beyond just the one between a powerful and wealthy Global North and a disenfranchised Global South (see the essay by Chatterji in this issue). Instead, they turn to a critical world that comprises of South-South affiliations (see Chakour), of more nuanced and heterogeneous global theories derived from local cultural productions (see essays by Roy, Anonymous), of diasporas interacting not just with hostlands but also other immigrant and exiled populations (see Moscovitch), of the investigation of transnational and cosmopolitan cultural interactions that existed before the latter half of the 20th century (see the essay by Jayagopalan).

The essays are not uncritically celebratory, especially of the framing category of South Asia and its evinced ability to address inequalities where other frameworks, like the nation, have failed. South Asian postcolonial theory has long been skeptical of the emancipatory potential of the nation-state, noting the blindness of the deep horizontal comradeship of these national imagined communities to the profound inequalities and conflicts within and perpetuated by national boundaries—Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments being perhaps the most well known of such arguments. A collective identity such as South Asian seems at first blush to tend to some of these blind spots, allowing for ethnic and transnational communities that belie the arbitrariness of national boundaries. However, left unexamined, South Asia, as an organizational logic for culture, may well compound rather than address the myopia of nation-based structures. Dibyesh Anand has spoken convincingly of India’s colonial and violent practices with its borderland ethnonations, and the continuing oppression in Kashmir, Assam, and the fate of the Rohingya, all present cautionary correctives, and not new ones, to any unquestioned celebration of South Asian identity. Essays collected in this special issue highlight the friction in these borderlands, notably in the spaces between South Asian countries—in Kashmir (see Hamid’s contribution), for instance, or Northeastern India (Goswami).

If what emerged from the conference was the need to scrutinize the boundaries of South Asia as a category that informs literary criticism adequately, then what has emerged from this collection is a similar and related critique of the imagined contours of “the world.” Overwhelmingly, the essays in this collection return to the idea of the porous boundaries between the world and South Asia. Though the authors represent multiple disciplines, theoretical approaches, and objects of study, they collectively argue that the dynamic between South Asia and the world, which bleeds into other relational dynamics, such as between the self and the other (as noted by R. Radhakrishnan in his essay here) or even the private and the public, are clearly interpenetrating. This is not to say, however, that they are intertwined in some egalitarian dialectics; perhaps the most important lesson from Mary Louise Pratt about contact zones, qua sites of transculturation, is the struggle, intercultural conflict, and sustaining inequality of power that defines them, so that she delineates contact zones as: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1991, 34).

The point, then, is to conceive of South Asian subjectivities and/in global contingencies as something not, on the one hand, an essentialist enaction of dominance and subservience, nor, on the other, a meeting of materially matched twin protagonists. In trying to recast the narrative, as it were, of South Asian culture, taking into account global frameworks from either end of this continuum, the scholars included here attempt to rethink the agency of the various oppressed subjectivities we find in South Asian literature without diminishing the power differentials under which such subjectivities are elaborated.

Fundamental to this task is to carry into this project what postcolonial thinkers have been calling for some decades now, namely decentering the space that Europe, both as the site that produces the hierarchical thinking that positions itself at the zenith as well as the apparatus that enforces this hierarchy, has had in the way that the postcolony imagines itself. These calls to critique this politically and philosophically circumscribed Europe are of course varied, and include, among others, Ngugi’s call in 1986 to decolonize the mind or to reverse the relationship between Europe and Africa so that Africa is at the center of and Europe is recast as peripheral to African knowledge; Dipesh Chakrabarty’s poststructuralist call in 2000 to provincialize Europe, which urged the creation of nonhistorical historiography or a way of recounting the past without resorting to the (in Chakrabarty’s perspective) Eurocentric legacies of modern, rational, and secular thinking; and Walter Mignolo’s outlining in 2011 of the decolonial thinking which would unveil the “darker side of modernity” or coloniality—contemporary circumstances will prevent decolonial thinking from replacing coloniality, but it will sit alongside it, announcing itself as the more ethical and communal option even as coloniality continues.

Of course, the world is not Europe, and writers like Amitav Ghosh have used their fiction as well as their nonfiction to argue against assumptions that transnational interactions, especially those outsides of Europe, are a postwar or even a twentieth-century phenomenon. He did this in his early nonfictional text, In An Antique Land, which delighted on pondering the contacts between non-Europeans outside any kind of European framework (Grewal 2007), as well as in his more recent Ibis trilogy. Apparently responding to the criticism of In An Antique Land for romanticizing a precolonial past, in the later novels, Ghosh confronts and works through rather than around issues of asymmetrical material realities generated by colonialism but also through other, attendant, if more local inequalities. Fanqui-town in River of Smoke, for instance, provides a particularly evocative synecdoche for a cosmopolis, housing traders of myriad national and economic interests, where individual, corporate, and national desires coexist but are ultimately shaped by imperial priorities.

So, even though the world is not Europe, we have to continue to contend with how Europe has long shaped the narration of the world; in this book’s small attempt to counter this narration, we find our theoretical models in thinkers like Priyamvada Gopal. Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, first, builds on the work of other historians to demonstrate that colonialism exerted a force over not only land, resources, culture, and people, but also narratives of resistance to colonialism itself, establishing with such determination the idea that freedom, emancipation, and liberty were Western creations, that this is the dominant and sometimes only way in which anticolonial efforts are framed in public English discourse. Second, undercutting this powerful erasure, she shows that not only is colonialism chronologically coterminous with resistance to it, but also that rather than English and British disseminating ideas of freedom into the colonies, it has been that anticolonial activity in the colonies framed and influenced British dissent of empire.

Gopal does not specifically address the term transculturation, or, for that matter, a contact zone, yet there are resonances with Pratt in the way that she argues that to see and make visible intercultural contact between the imperial center and colony is to contend with rather than erase the sustaining imbalances in their power: “Without pretending that the field could ever have been level or the lines of influence simply reciprocal given the constitutive power differential, this book suggests that there was also an anticolonial impact from outside Europe on metropolitan thought” (Gopal 2019, 7). Gopal also does not contend with Chakrabarty, but the opposition between their cosmologies is significant for our purposes here; whereas Chakrabarty cedes the ground of rational, secular, historical thought to Europe, Gopal’s fundamental and articulated assumption is that criticism of oppression and resistance is inherent to all societies. In this, she most closely echoes Satya Mohanty, who has argued that though we may well attribute to our understanding of critique to Kant, and therefore acknowledge its European roots, nonetheless, “No matter how different cultural Others are, they are never so different that they are—as typical members of their culture—incapable of acting purposefully, of evaluating their actions in light of their ideas and previous experiences, and of being ‘rational’ in this minimal way” (Mohanty 1997, 298).

Our effort in Global South Asia: South Asian Literatures and the World is similarly motivated by the idea of demonstrating what I have referred to as the porous boundaries between categories such as “South Asia” and “the World,” or, in other words, to demonstrate the fallacies of essentialist understandings of either of these descriptors, even as we articulate and critique the unequal power they wield. This is why, while it may seem odd to start off with an essay that seems skeptical of the potential of terrestrially embedded categories such as “South Asian literature” or “world literature” to aptly name and identify the ineffable relationship that parts can have to the whole, or literature to the world, R.Radhakrishnan’s essay “Between the World and Home: Tagore and Goethe” raises crucial questions that can productively frame the other essays. Radhakrishnan posits that Tagore’s works help us to understand that, while power and self-interest cleave the self and other apart, a true commitment to the other would have to move beyond the “zero-sum game of politics.” In connecting the very different conceptions of the world that Tagore and Goethe conjure, Radhakrishnan argues that the immanence of individuals, of the self, of a particular category like South Asia, constitutes rather than sits in opposition to the transcendence implied by collectives, others, or “the world.”

In his essay “‘Against the Biggest Buccaneering Enterprise in Living History’”: Krishna Menon and the Colonial Response to International Crisis,” Brant Moscovitch asks “How [...] can we better gauge expressions of empathy and solidarity, particularity when zooming out further to imagine connections and interdependencies within something approaching a larger Global South beyond the regional?” He responds through this essay by commenting on the unifying potential of cosmopolitan relationships to cement and build south-south affinities. In particular, Moscovitch focuses on the work of V. K. Krishna Menon whose involvement in London anticolonial activism, for instance with the India League LSE, fostered a specific kind of internationalism that, for Moscovitch, blended liberal internationalism with socialism. Moscovitch argues that through his connections with Jomo Kenyatta, by helping generate support for Abyssinia, by working for medical aid to China, Menon was able to augment south-south alliances, using the metropolitan and imperial center of London in solidarity efforts. While aware of and addressing the pervasive cultural prejudices that nonetheless prevented some utopian collective within immigrants of the Global South in London, Moscovitch shows how these affiliations and solidarity movements were not just a key feature of the late twentieth century and postcolonial conditions but were also sewn into the fabric of anticolonial activity.

In the only essay in this collection that focuses on poetry, Wafa Hamid examines the coterminous poetics and politics of Agha Shahid Ali’s work in her essay “Bodies in Translation/Transition: (Re)Writing Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry.” Hamid asks what happens to the question of the negotiation of the private and the public in work whose creation is circumscribed not only by external realities but specifically by war and crisis. These circumstances are particularly urgent in the case of Ali’s poetry on Kashmir, which confronts the state-sponsored majoritarian violence that has had a chokehold on the region. Hamid’s develops her argument—that Ali uses language as a way to criticize state silences, and that the gaps of incomplete translations house the potential for anti-statist agency—through a combination of intensive textual analysis and extensive theoretical and philosophical sourcing. In and through this fluid methodology, Hamid establishes that complex and shifting poetics like that of Agha Shahid Ali’s reveal rather than obscure the political potential of poetry ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: South Asian Literature and the World
• 2 Between World and Home: Tagore and Goethe
• 3 “Against the Biggest Buccaneering Enterprise in Living History”: Krishna Menon and the Colonial Response to International Crisis
• 4 Bodies in Translation/Transition: (Re)Writing Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry
• 5 Home, Away from Home: Violence, Womanhood and Home/Land in Jahnavi Barua’s Fiction
• 6 From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire
• 7 Dastan-e Amir Hamza and Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
• 8 Ajitesh Bandyopadhyay, Nandikar, and the World: Staging World Literature in Bengali
• 9 Queering the Colonial in Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea
• 10 At the Interface of Colonial Knowing and Unknowing: A Critical Reading of the Golden Camellia in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke
• 11 Unveiling the Transcultural: The Question of Identity in Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Saudade
• 12 Looking Backward to a Distant Land: South Asian Diaspora and Function of Nostalgia in “Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,” “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Inheritance of Loss
• Index