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 MĂŒller, the famed nineteenth century Sanskritist and philologist, inspired by the latterâs Indological research. Showing up on his doorstep, the pandit enthusiastically rang the bell and awaited an answer. For some reason, MĂŒller himself answered the door, (rather than his butler). The pandit immediately recognized him and began an energetic, laudatory outpouring commending MĂŒllerâs workâŠ. MĂŒller looked at him quizzically. In his perfectly accented English he asked, âwhich language are you speaking?â
âhearsay
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
âT.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 issuesâwhether 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 Cullerâs 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 poetryâand observation that echoes classic work on âexpressiveâ 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 Cullerâs 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 (1857â1913). How did weâand I speak now as a critic and literary historian amongst other similarly disposed personsâtransition from romantic theories of language to Saussureâs Course in General Linguistics (1916) or for that matter, to someone like Roman Jakobson, whose essay âLinguistics and Poeticsâ (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 âliteratureâ and âliterarinessâ 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 hereâconcepts of literature and poetryâto global currents and their worldly dimension in contemporary scholarship. I draw upon the lexicon of âworldâ and âworldlinessâ from recent and slightly older work in literary studies, especially Pheng Cheahâs distinction between the âworldâ as an ontological category and the âglobeâ 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 âliteratureâ, as a concept in western India, its theoretical and practical underpinnings. Most consequential to literatureâs definition is a tradition of wandering, bardic poets known as ĆÄhÄ«rs (sg., pl. ĆÄhÄ«r; adj. ĆÄhirÄ«), who became the basis of a romanticist scholarly intervention in the 1870s that defined literature specifically in relation to its laukiktÄ or worldlinessâa worldliness laden with qualities of the here and now, rather than a transcendent other-world. In Marathi, the âliteraryâ came to be defined first and primarily through and against ĆÄhirÄ« 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 âBeyond Romanticismâ, I move away from the ĆÄhÄ«rs and instead approach an important figure in Marathi scholarship, Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar (ViáčŁáčuĆÄstrÄ« Cipáž·Ć«áčkar; 1850â1883), who was instrumental in outlining a definition of literature that placed ĆÄhirÄ« poetry at its core, building upon the romantic discourses of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744â1803). Given the pervasive discourse of colonialism as a âgiftâ from the coloniser to the colonised (a gift horse into whose mouth we should peer), I speak about the âregiftâ 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 colonisedâs gift. Using Chiplunkarâs analysis of ĆÄhirÄ« poetry, I wish to exhume that gift to highlight contributions from the colony to âtheoryâ. 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 (Germanâidealistic) versions available, and to define them in a more precise way that enables the real imaginative contours of the colonisedâs gift (to the coloniser) to shine. As Padma Rangarajan writes, âIn 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.â6
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 âliteratureâ 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 âliteratureâ conceals and subsumes a diverse array of literary cultures and their âproductsâ 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, âis 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.â7 In this section and throughout this essay, I attempt to describe how earlier forms of literature became the âliteratureâ we understand today.
Before the 19th century was no satisfying translation of âliteratureâ that captures the termâs 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. âLiteratureâ is a misleading synonym for two terms used interchangeably in Marathi to denote something akin to the concept of âliteratureâ: vÄáč
may and sÄhitya. The first, vÄáč
may, is a nominalisation of the verbal root âvac of âspeakâ from Sanskrit with the suffix maya or âmade of/consisting ofâ. Together, they combine to suggest a meaning of vÄáč
may as âthat which is spokenâ. Even the modern verb âto readâ in Marathi is vÄcaáčeáč, yet again deriving from âvac. Curiously, this is not the most common root for âreadâ in Indian languages though at least Gujarati (vÄñcavuáč) and Malayalam (vÄyikkuka) share it, even though the latter is not a Sanskrit vernacular. Most Sanskrit vernaculars instead use a derivative of âpaáčh or âreadâ. Hence paážhanÄ (âto readâ) in Hindi, paáčatÄ in Bengali, paáčhana 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, âthe learned man in ancient India was the vÄgmin, master of speech, and not, as in Europe, the litteratus, the lettered manâ: vÄgmin too is derived from âvac.8 And the name vÄgmÄ«âthe feminine form of the nounâis a fairly common modern name too, signifying âeloquenceâ.
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 bÄáž 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 oneâs 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 vÄáč
may as something carrying the legacy of Sanskrit. But vÄáčmay is ontologically unique in one sense: owing to the way it was performed and public, vÄáčmay had, and still has, a world-making potential that is immediate with audiences and poet-performers co-present. VÄáčmay is a concept that persists to this day, albeit now reduced in usage, either specifically in reference to oral literature, or synonymously with sÄhitya, the second term, in popular discourse.
SÄhitya 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 âliteratureâ, 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 âliteratureâ itself organically permits. Semantically, sÄhitya can be quite ambiguous and doesnât even appear as a standalone term for literature (of any sort) in the definitive 19th-century Marathi dictionary, except in the compound form of sÄhitya-ĆÄstra or the science of sÄhitya 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 SÄhityaâs misleading root is âdhÄ or âputâ whose past tense can take the form hita; with the prefix sa or âwithâ, it becomes akin to âput together withâ something. As a noun, sÄhitya can also be a tool or implement required to produce something.13 Both dictionaries list multiple definitions of sÄhitya as a tool or implement. With an adjective, for example, it can refer to specific tools or implements, as in pĆ«jece sÄhitya, the...