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World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India
Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890
Kedar Arun Kulkarni
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eBook - ePub
World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India
Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890
Kedar Arun Kulkarni
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World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound, wide availability of print technology. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity.
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Part I
LITERATURE REMADE
1
ROMANTICISM IN INDIA AND GIFTS FOR THE COLONISER
In a widely known, though likely apocryphal story, a brahman pandit traveled all the way to Oxford to meet Max Müller, the famed nineteenth century Sanskritist and philologist, inspired by the latter’s Indological research. Showing up on his doorstep, the pandit enthusiastically rang the bell and awaited an answer. For some reason, Müller himself answered the door, (rather than his butler). The pandit immediately recognized him and began an energetic, laudatory outpouring commending Müller’s work…. Müller looked at him quizzically. In his perfectly accented English he asked, ‘which language are you speaking?’
—hearsay
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal … the good poet welds his theft into a whole feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn....1
—T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood
How was literature defined in the 19th century? Was literature defined according to a specific genre? Did some generalisable quality define all literature? And what was its relationship to language? Recent work in literary studies has articulated some of these issues—whether in relation to the status of fiction, expression, the way adab came to define literature in 19th-century Egypt or the way languages develop literatures.2 If one follows Jonathon Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), for example, it appears as though there is little happening between romantic theories of literature in the late 18th to the early 19th centuries and the early to mid-20th century, especially with regards to lyric poetry—and observation that echoes classic work on ‘expressive’ theories of literature such as M.H. Abrams.3 Rather than revisit the works of various 19th-century persons, such as Pierre Gautier, Jules Michelet, Charles Baudelaire, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and John Ruskin in order to disprove or disagree or even agree with Culler’s work, I am interested in what happens when we follow romantic or expressive theories of literature and rout them through India, in order to demonstrate how the colonies were conduits between romantic theories of language and literature and newer theories of language (and literature) that emerged in the early 20th century, especially in the wake of persons such as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). How did we—and I speak now as a critic and literary historian amongst other similarly disposed persons—transition from romantic theories of language to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) or for that matter, to someone like Roman Jakobson, whose essay ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (1958) is still harping upon expressivity, connotation, among other things, in addition to his Saussure-inspired distinctions between syntagmatic and paradigmatic? In writing about the colony as that theoretical link, this chapter argues that theories of language and poetics from Sanskrit enabled European theories to move out of the 18th century and into the 20th. That is, the colonies gifted various theories of poetry and language to revitalise the European metropole and pull it out of its theoretical belatedness.
This chapter charts the fortunes of ‘literature’ and ‘literariness’ as concepts in western India, especially with regards to poetry. It does so to provide a crucial link between late 18th- and 19th-century romanticism and early 20th-century theories of language and literature. But I do so in a way that connects the topics contained here—concepts of literature and poetry—to global currents and their worldly dimension in contemporary scholarship. I draw upon the lexicon of ‘world’ and ‘worldliness’ from recent and slightly older work in literary studies, especially Pheng Cheah’s distinction between the ‘world’ as an ontological category and the ‘globe’ as a space within which literature circulates. But my point here is not to reinforce that genealogy, but rather almost to forget it, until the very end of this article, in order to deploy alternative, rooted (worldly) but nonetheless connected (global) conceptual bases for analysis.4 In the first half, I describe and analyse the parameters of ‘literature’, as a concept in western India, its theoretical and practical underpinnings. Most consequential to literature’s definition is a tradition of wandering, bardic poets known as śāhīrs (sg., pl. śāhīr; adj. śāhirī), who became the basis of a romanticist scholarly intervention in the 1870s that defined literature specifically in relation to its laukiktā or worldliness—a worldliness laden with qualities of the here and now, rather than a transcendent other-world. In Marathi, the ‘literary’ came to be defined first and primarily through and against śāhirī poetry, and nearly synchronously with the colonial-institutional practices and romantic poetic theories briefly alluded to above. I describe and analyse these simultaneous processes in the second and third sections of Part 1 with reference to Marathi language and literature.
In the latter half of this chapter, beginning with ‘Beyond Romanticism’, I move away from the śāhīrs and instead approach an important figure in Marathi scholarship, Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar (Viṣṇuśāstrī Cipḷūṇkar; 1850–1883), who was instrumental in outlining a definition of literature that placed śāhirī poetry at its core, building upon the romantic discourses of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Given the pervasive discourse of colonialism as a ‘gift’ from the coloniser to the colonised (a gift horse into whose mouth we should peer), I speak about the ‘regift’ from the colonised to the coloniser via Chiplunkar.5 If orientalist discourse was part of the intellectual contexts of the early and mid-19th century, the late 19th and early 20th unabashedly tried to bury the importance of the colonised’s gift. Using Chiplunkar’s analysis of śāhirī poetry, I wish to exhume that gift to highlight contributions from the colony to ‘theory’. My purpose and goal of this literary history, then, is two-fold: to find vocabularies of worldliness and globalism within the discipline of comparative literary studies that rely on alternative and intersecting genealogies than the (German–idealistic) versions available, and to define them in a more precise way that enables the real imaginative contours of the colonised’s gift (to the coloniser) to shine. As Padma Rangarajan writes, ‘In the realm of colonial exchange, the essential power of a gift (and especially a regift) lies not in the object itself but in the interpretive force of its transmission.’6
PART 1: WHAT WAS LITERATURE?
In order to understand how romantic theories transformed the way Indian intellectuals began to think about literature in Indian vernaculars, it is worthwhile to acknowledge the overlapping and distinct qualities of what ‘literature’ was, conceptually speaking, in South Asia before the 19th century. In the wake of contemporary world-literature debates, this is particularly important given that literary exchange is not a recent phenomenon limited to the postcolonial world, but has taken place in the past, during the 19th century and earlier. Our contemporary and universal category of ‘literature’ conceals and subsumes a diverse array of literary cultures and their ‘products’ within a dyad of writing and reading that may not always be comparable with each other without such an ontological refashioning. Such universalisms, writes Aamir Mufti, and the circulation of literature through translation, ‘is predicated on, and helps to reproduce, reading publics oblivious to the possibility of historical alternatives in the past or the present, even and especially in the Global South.’7 In this section and throughout this essay, I attempt to describe how earlier forms of literature became the ‘literature’ we understand today.
Before the 19th century was no satisfying translation of ‘literature’ that captures the term’s full semantic range in the Marathi language. But one finds approximate terms that, instead, enable us to interrogate contemporary discourses of worldliness and its relationship to literature. ‘Literature’ is a misleading synonym for two terms used interchangeably in Marathi to denote something akin to the concept of ‘literature’: vāṅmay and sāhitya. The first, vāṅmay, is a nominalisation of the verbal root √vac of ‘speak’ from Sanskrit with the suffix maya or ‘made of/consisting of’. Together, they combine to suggest a meaning of vāṅmay as ‘that which is spoken’. Even the modern verb ‘to read’ in Marathi is vācaṇeṃ, yet again deriving from √vac. Curiously, this is not the most common root for ‘read’ in Indian languages though at least Gujarati (vāñcavuṁ) and Malayalam (vāyikkuka) share it, even though the latter is not a Sanskrit vernacular. Most Sanskrit vernaculars instead use a derivative of √paṭh or ‘read’. Hence paḍhanā (‘to read’) in Hindi, paṛatē in Bengali, paṛhana in Punjabi. These subtle semantic modulations tangentially point to differing notions of literacy in South Asia, and also prompt us to more carefully distinguish between regions of what is now India (rather than see any one region as representative), where graphic literacy was often seen as a notch below the virtuosity of grammatically correct oratory and speech. As Pollock points out, ‘the learned man in ancient India was the vāgmin, master of speech, and not, as in Europe, the litteratus, the lettered man’: vāgmin too is derived from √vac.8 And the name vāgmī—the feminine form of the noun—is a fairly common modern name too, signifying ‘eloquence’.
The vernaculars, however, are different from Sanskrit, but even when the precolonial bard performed in Marathi, he had his notebook of composed poetry called a bāḍ but only used it as a reference guide. The real authority lay in the performance.9 Let me restate that differently: literature was a live performance event, spoken and heard in public, not usually read in the privacy of one’s home. Similarly, in legal and political settings in early modern western India, the oratorical performance was conspicuously more important than what may have been written down, and often impressed upon and changed the written word.10 In this way, it does make sense to think of the Marathi vāṅmay as something carrying the legacy of Sanskrit. But vāṇmay is ontologically unique in one sense: owing to the way it was performed and public, vāṇmay had, and still has, a world-making potential that is immediate with audiences and poet-performers co-present. Vāṇmay is a concept that persists to this day, albeit now reduced in usage, either specifically in reference to oral literature, or synonymously with sāhitya, the second term, in popular discourse.
Sāhitya is the more inclusive term found in the names of official literary societies all over India, but its usage is also more recent. Even though in contemporary usage, it is synonymous with ‘literature’, here too, we encounter several unique and complicating differences that also intersect with notions of worldliness, perhaps in a way that is more precise than the term ‘literature’ itself organically permits. Semantically, sāhitya can be quite ambiguous and doesn’t even appear as a standalone term for literature (of any sort) in the definitive 19th-century Marathi dictionary, except in the compound form of sāhitya-śāstra or the science of sāhitya with reference to the Sanskrit discourse on literature, grammar and poetics.11 Tulpule and Feldhaus too, in their dictionary of old Marathi, define the term through Sanskrit, referring primarily to rhetoric and literary style rather than literature itself.12 Sāhitya’s misleading root is √dhā or ‘put’ whose past tense can take the form hita; with the prefix sa or ‘with’, it becomes akin to ‘put together with’ something. As a noun, sāhitya can also be a tool or implement required to produce something.13 Both dictionaries list multiple definitions of sāhitya as a tool or implement. With an adjective, for example, it can refer to specific tools or implements, as in pūjece sāhitya, the...