Consumable Texts in Contemporary India

Uncultured Books and Bibliographical Sociology

S. Gupta

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137489289
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137489296
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Social Sciences

Through what he terms "bibliographical sociology", Suman Gupta explores the presence of English-language publications in the contemporary Indian context – their productions, circulations and readerships – to understand current social trends.

1

Keywords and Preliminaries

The following seven chapters of this study analyse the social significance of five kinds of English-language books which are produced, circulated and received in India with varying but marked degrees of market success. Their significance is generally played down or entirely neglected by academic researchers, which is itself a matter of some interest here. The first of these, which I call “commercial fiction” in English, has received occasional analytical attention and will probably receive more in the future. The second, English translations of vernacular pulp fiction, has excited some media interest but little in scholarly circles and seems unlikely to in the future. The third is not really a kind of book but a single book, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which sustains a not insubstantial publishing industry and commands a considerable market in India and indeed globally. Insofar as research and analysis goes, its presence has largely been shrouded in silence. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are addressed to each of these, respectively. The fourth kind, Group Discussion guidebooks, has been disregarded by academics and even journalists. And the final kind, public sector “value education” publications, has interested some educationists but not researchers exploring book circulations in a critical fashion. Of the five, the last two kinds are probably the most prolifically produced and consumed, and two chapters are devoted to each.

My analytical method in engaging with these five kinds of books is probably better exemplified in the following chapters than summarized. However, some preliminary clarifications about my method seem expedient. There is nothing particularly original about this method, but it is seldom exercised in a sustained and consistent fashion. Besides, the very announcement that I engage analytically with such books is likely to arouse preconceptions and expectations – about how such books should be characterized and what analysing them entails – which this study may not satisfy. These initial clarifications address those likely preconceptions and expectations by turn.

Appropriate terms

The project of analysing the kinds of books mentioned above is apt to be positioned in the bracket of “cultural studies”. That serves well enough for marketing purposes and for shelving the present book appropriately, though I suggest a more specific category for it later in this chapter. As a contribution to cultural studies, the characterization of the above kinds of books as “uncultured books” in the subtitle is obviously a provocation. It hardly needs to be said that the normative content of the term “uncultured” has no place in cultural studies, or in aligned humanistic and sociological disciplines. The provocation is in foregrounding the pressures of normative selectiveness, which bear upon my difficulty in characterizing these books and also my interest in them.

In thinking about this project, I was determined not to approach these kinds of books with a normative predisposition; I wished to analyse them without preconceived ideas about their being good or bad, right or wrong, worthy or unworthy and so on. That was naturally because such books are subject to exactly these sorts of value judgements in an everyday and unthinking fashion, in blithe as in grave (perhaps particularly) exchanges, generally on the side of being unworthy of serious consideration or worse. In some instances, they are branded as light-reading and make a sellable virtue of their lightheartedness: several “genres” of commercial fiction and pulp fiction are definably market worthy because they refuse serious consideration. Neither unthinking dismissiveness nor refusal of seriousness should predispose an academic analysis of these books; it seems reasonable to expect that academic analysis would not be predetermined as normatively serious or unserious and would rather consist in systematic and careful exploration (though both attitudes are of analytical interest). Arguably though, that I have chosen books which are subject to implicitly norm-laden neglect is itself revealing of a sort of normative selectiveness – let’s say a kind of oppositional normative principle, designed to question an existing and dominant attitude (to provoke, as I said).

Thus far, all is straightforward. It becomes less straightforward when I try to characterize such books together (come up with an appellation less nebulous than “such books”) in terms which are widely accepted in academia. Thinking of such books together as “popular” or for the “masses” seems the obvious recourse, and thereby they are easily placed in academic discourses and scholarly categories: as “popular books” or “mass-market books”, in terms of “popular print circulations” and “mass consumption” and “popular/mass cultural products” and so on. I have some practical qualms about doing so in this instance. In a common-sense way, it seems “mass” should carry quantitative weight, and while the sales of such books have been notable at times, they have frequently not been weighty enough or dispersed enough – and almost never tractable enough – to be considered “mass-market”. Similarly, “popular” suggests that these books have not only sold well but been received with widespread enthusiasm, in a way that can be charted. Charting enthusiasm, in this instance, is a tricky business: enthusiasm sits very uneasily with Mein Kampf and seems out of place for Group Discussion guidebooks and public sector publications on “value education”; and while enthusiasm appears to be germane to commercial fiction and translated vernacular pulp fiction in a general way, that is unevenly evidenced (and particularly weak for the translations in question). Often, the mass-market or popular character of such books has been a construction put on them by publishers and culture-trend watchers rather than borne by their uptake among readers. However, such practical qualms about terms are generally easily side-stepped in academic discourses, because the latter ponder the complex nuances of terms like “mass” and “popular” while using them. The repertoire of scholarly terminology foregrounds the complex connotations of the terms it adopts and thereby interrogates and complicates their usage.

Researchers contemplating particular terms in cultural studies – especially terms which stand at the juncture of ordinary/non-academic usage and academic usage – have often turned to Raymond Williams’ Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1983/1976). That was what Williams’ compendium of certain words (an outline of a vocabulary) was meant for, offering discussions of words that are

significantly not the specialized vocabulary of a specialized discipline [ . . . ] but a general vocabulary ranging from strong, difficult and persuasive words in everyday usage to words which, beginning in particular specialized contexts, have become quite common in descriptions of wider areas of thought and experience. (p.14)

Of course, researchers don’t appeal to Williams’ compendium as a substitution for wide reading and deep contemplation (or never admit to doing so), but do so as to bounce their fuzzy and numerously referred reflections against happily succinct observations. I have looked up “masses” and “popular” and “culture” in Keywords on many occasions, and I have consulted their applications and interrogations in Williams’ and other scholars’ works, and it is a temptation (and good academic form) to demonstrate my “awareness of the field” at this stage. Having checked Keywords again, however, I am drawn towards a different direction: I find myself pondering the term “keywords” itself. How terms like “mass” and “popular” appear in academic discourses has something to do with how keywords are conceived, and I should think this through before going into what to make of terms like “mass” and “popular” here.

Williams’ approach to identifying and discussing keywords has usually been explored in view of the various avenues through which the book came about (in his Introduction, pp.11–26; O’Connor 1989, pp.49–55; Inglis 1995, pp.245–6): that is, out of reverie about the shifting connotations of words like (particularly) “culture” after the war; as an unpublished glossary for Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958); as notes for adult education classes which Williams taught; and as responsive to preceding books on culture (especially Eliot 1948; Empson 1951). More usefully, Williams’ introduction made a clear distinction between his treatment of words in Keywords and the manner in which they are treated in dictionaries (the Oxford English Dictionary his obvious example) or in a philological vein. His argument against both the latter was that these apparently fix words in singular and apparently neutral ways, and his interest was in the way they were comprehended in social life and processes:

[N]ot [as] a tradition to be learned, nor a consensus to be accepted, nor a set of meanings which, because it is “our language”, has a natural authority; but as a shaping and reshaping, in real circumstances and from profoundly different and important points of view: a vocabulary in use, to find our own ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history.

(Williams 1983/1979, p.25; emphasis in original)

Unsurprisingly, Williams’ book was received sceptically by both linguists and social theorists on the grounds of over-determining the centrality of words in the conveyance of meaning, and of tacit ideological interference from the author’s own political subscriptions and location. This reception was outlined by Fred Inglis (1995, pp.246–51), who reiterated the disparaging judgements on his own account. Though academic doubt about the soundness of Keywords has been fairly constantly expressed, its usefulness has been equally constantly acknowledged. Numerous compendiums of keywords for more specific areas of sociology and cultural studies have appeared since. In the spirit of Williams’ project, almost three decades later Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris’s edited volume, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (2005), appeared – with entries written by contributors from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Australia. The plurality of voices here was itself meant to be an answer to some of Williams’ critics, and it otherwise updated the transaction between specialist usage and general usage that Williams had sought to explore.

Updating the range of word transactions between specialist (academic) and ordinary/general (non-academic) usage does the job to a certain extent, but the project of revising the vocabulary could have gone further. It could, for instance, have reflected not just on the changing range of the vocabulary in question but also on the added centrality of such a vocabulary and the mechanics of the transaction itself. Reading Keywords now need not simply be a matter of looking back to the text according to its purposes at the time, but it could also imply rereading that text in terms of shifts in its conceptual basis. The significance of what “keywords” means has expanded dramatically since the late 1970s/early 1980s, and reading Keywords now is necessarily laden by retrospective revitalization in terms of what “keywords” means now. Most obviously, “keywords” now signify a central strategy for arranging, retrieving and consulting information and documented knowledge in the hypertextual environment (in online searches of every kind, in checking digital archives, etc.). It has become, so to speak, technologically centred in everyday engagements with information/knowledge sources, whereas a few decades back keywords were confined to the relatively marginal precincts of linguistic and bibliographical studies. Habituation with keyword-centred disposition of knowledge and information, and searching/retrieval therein, is effectively a reorientation of how knowledge is conceived and consumed at the interfaces where specialist and ordinary discourses meet now. Quite naturally, this has been extensively explored by analysts of search-engine technologies; relevantly, for example, in Archer’s (2009, pp.3–4) explanation of how machine-generated and human-generated keywords involve complementary and overlapping processes. From a somewhat different direction, the growing centrality of keywords has also been theorized further in terms of the triggering role they play in argumentative exchanges by bringing together multiple frames (usefully discussed in Bigi and Morasso 2012, especially p.1140). Such recent reorientations and centring of “keywords” do not disqualify Williams’ sense of the term but accentuate and render explicit some of the implicit connotations of his usage.

One of the ways in which retrospective rethinking of Williams’ use of “keywords” clarifies his intentions concerns the modus operandi of the transaction between specialist (academic) and ordinary (non-academic) usage. In his Introduction, Williams had given a minimal account of this and had performed (rather than theorized) the transaction in discussions of specific keywords. Bennett, Grossberg and Meaghan’s New Keywords (2005) accepted Williams’ reasoning (pp.xviii–xix) and also didn’t theorize but chose to exemplify through discussion. Theorizing that transaction, however, sharpens not only the modus operandi of the travel of keywords between (to and from) specialist and ordinary usage but also the interpenetrations and distinctions between academic and a range of non-academic discourses. If the layers of mechanical and human considerations which coalesce into keywords are taken apart, and if the multiple frames which are triggered by keywords disaggregated, it becomes possible to answer that implicit question: by what precise processes do certain words travel between academic and non-academic, specialist and general, discourse formations? A systematic examination of this would naturally be a protracted affair, and a step-by-step exposition is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, having considered the matter more or less systematically, it seems to me that one of the processes in question could be delineated thus: normative associations for, and switches between different normative registers with regard to, words which are not explicitly norm-bearing (say, in a dictionary definition) play a salient part in transactions that enable keywords to surface. The social and political dynamics invested in normative allocations (for instance, in terms of social class relations or identity politics or institutional functioning) enable the proliferations and significances which make keywords such.

The process of complex normative attributions to and switches between registers through keywords was something that Williams and his intellectual descendants were entirely alive to and noted prolifically in their discussions of specific keywords. As it happens, both “masses” and “popular” are excellent examples of the play of norms in that fashion. “The masses”, according to Keywords (1983/1976; emphasis in original), “[ . . . ] is especially interesting because it is ambivalent: a term of contempt in much conservative thought, but a positive term in much socialist thought” (p.192). Accordingly:

In the modern social sense [ . . . ] masses and mass have two distinguishable kinds of implication. Masses (i) is the modern word for many-headed multitude or mob: low, ignorant, unstable. Masses (ii) is the description of the same people but now seen as a positive or potentially positive social force. [ . . . ] What [mass production] describes is a process of consumption, the mass market, where mass is a variation of sense (i), the many-headed multitude but now a many-headed multitude with purchasing power. Mass market was contrasted with quality market, retaining more of sense (i), but by extension mass production came to mean production in large numbers. The deepest difficulty of C20 uses of mass is then apparent: that a word which had indicated and still indicates (favourably and unfavourably) a solid aggregate now also means a very large number of things or people. (p.195)

“Popular”, in Williams’ discussion, also goes through shifts from neutral (referring to the whole people) to variously normativized inflections that nevertheless overlap with each other:

Popular was being seen [from the 19th century] from the point of view of the people rather than from those seeking favour or power from them. Yet the earlier sense had not died. Popular culture was not identified by the people but by others, and it still carries two older senses: inferior kinds of work (cf. popular literature, popular press as distinguished from quality press); and work deliberately setting out to win favour (popular journalism as distinguished from democratic journalism, or popular entertainment); as well as the more modern sense of well-liked by many people, with which, of course, in many cases, the earlier senses overlap. (p.237)

In the New Keywords (2005), these terms are revised and updated, but the normative associations in different registers remain and in some ways become more definite. So, for “mass” it is observed:

The term seems initially to be a simply descriptive one, referring to a substantial entity, such as a large mass of material, or to a large number of persons collected together. However, it also has a powerful evaluative dimension. Most usages centrally involve the idea of the way that being part of a mass involves the loss of individuality.

(Morley 2005, p.207)

And “popular” in “popular culture” comes with the following unsatisfactory irresolution:

It is this use of “popular” [i.e. to designate forms of art and entertainment appealing to ordinary people] which generates the definition of popular culture as culture which is widely favoured or well liked by many people. The difficulty with the coming together of “culture” and “popular” in this way is that unless we can agree on a figure over which something becomes popular culture, and below which it is just culture, we might find that “widely favoured or well liked by many people” would include so much as to be virtually useless as a conceptual definition of popular culture. On the other hand, if we want a non-evaluative, purely descriptive definition, this may be the only useful one.

(Storey 2005, p.262)

Between Keywords (1983/1976) and New Keywords (2005), while much has changed, the play of normative nuances – accruing, overlapping, contradicting, accentuating, shifting between different registers – and neutral definitions focalize terms like “mass” and “popular” in similar ways. The struggle of the academic who is interested in neutral definition and has to register complex normative associations in different registers is writ large here.

The above quotations clarify a modus operandi for the play of normative...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Keywords and Preliminaries
• 2. Indian Commercial Fiction in English
• 3. Indian Vernacular Pulp Fiction in English Translation
• 4. On the Indian Readers of Hitler’s Mein Kampf
• 5. Framing Group Discussion Guidebooks
• 6. Low-End Group Discussion Guidebooks and Kunjis
• 7. Approaching Public Sector “Value Education” Publications
• 8. Mapping Public Sector “Value Education” Publications
• 9. Rules of Bibliographical Sociology’s Method
• Bibliography
• Index