Genealogies of Indian Literature

Since who or what is Indian has always remained a matter of contention, the
term Indian literature becomes even more difficult to define and understand. Literature
in India is as old as its paintings or its sculpture, but a sustained pursuit of its history began
only at the dawn of the 19th century. That is when Indian literature became a
theoretical category. But from the Sanskrit bias of early European Indologists,
to the reformist-nationalist-modernist projects, to the ease with writing in English,
literature in India has traversed diverse terrains.
P P RAVEENDRAN

I
n recent days there has been a great deal of debate on the found immediate acceptability in the Oriental world in the era of
significance of the two words Indian and literature, modernity and colonisation. What all this suggests is that the
though not always in a contiguous context, and certainly not cultural roots of Indian literature and Indian sensibility
on the same level of theoretical and political resonance. Taken should be construed as running deeper and stronger than the roots
separately, neither Indian nor literature would elicit uniform of the corresponding tendencies in the socio-economic realm.
response even from the common reader. While who or what is We are grappling here with questions of knowledge formation,
Indian has always remained a matter of contention among and in this context it is worthwhile to remember that knowledge
sections of the citizenry, especially in post-independence India, is not a neutral category that gets circulated in a society in an
what constitutes real literature has also been a matter of serious unmediated way. In fact certain segments of the society decide
debate, more particularly in these turbulent times when the what is to be counted as knowledge in given moments of social
conflicting claims of a fragmented public on the societys cultural development. If knowledge in India with its long history of
capital have proved to be a little too difficult to settle. The imperial rule continues to be tainted by colonial ideology even
wrangles on the political and social fronts that the country after 57 years of independence, it only proves Gramscis thesis
witnessed after the events in post-Babri Ayodhya and post- that material presence is not essential for the exercise of cultural
Godhra Gujarat, are pointers to the semantic difficulties asso- leadership by a dominant group over an underprivileged group.
ciated with the word Indian. Similarly, at the centre of the newly Imperialism must have come to an end, but not the Empire,
proliferating body of dalit and female writing appearing in almost as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recently proclaimed.1 This,
all the Indian languages today is an uncertainty regarding its status notwithstanding the theoretical distinction they want maintained
as literature or perhaps as Literature. between the two concepts, as the lineaments of the decentred
To link the two terms and talk about a unified Indian literature and deterritorialised cultural empire evolving in India today does
in such a contested terrain would seem a little perverse. More not seem to be far removed from the global scenario appearing
perverse is the attempt to elaborate a concept of Indian literature in their cartography. Literary scholars in India then will have
connected by a commonly shared sensibility. In the fast-changing to be self-critical about colonialisms impact on their own cultural
global scenario of economic liberalisation and cultural responses that leads to the building up of a new empire. This
recolonisation, where artistic sensibilities are expected to lose will also make it imperative for them at this juncture in time,
their regional flavours and merge into an international sensibility that is, after more than five decades of independence and 500
of global currency, such an attempt might lead to further prob- years of colonial and imperial rule, to rethink concepts like
lems. Alternatively, just as the advocates of liberalisation and Indianness, Indian sensibility and Indian literature a little more
globalisation nurse fond hopes of a strengthened Indian polity closely and critically than has been done before, so that they might
and economy to emerge from the present global climate, the uncover the complicity of these concepts with the
proponents of cultural globalisation too visualise a reinforced ideology of colonialism on one hand and that of globalisation on
Indian sensibility and Indian literature to come out of the present the other.
imbroglio. But if we examine things a little more closely, we
realise that unlike in the spheres of economy and polity, the Indian Literature: A Contested Category
warring supporters of global and Indian sensibilities are not likely
to remain at loggerheads with each other in the literary sphere. A literary sensibility, needless to say, always operates in the
This is primarily because there has been in vogue, at least since context of a unified body of literature and an integrated literary
India came into contact with the European literary ideology, a culture. Can we in the present context speak about such a unified
strong perception that the literary experience is perhaps universal body of Indian literature and an integrated environment of Indian
in significance. Goethes Weltliteratur and Tagores Viswasahitya, literary culture? Before attempting to answer that question it
both meaning world literature, were attempts at theorising this might be pertinent to point out that Indian literature, an
perception, though the Euro-centric bias of the two concepts ontologically unified object that is theorised as connected by a
escaped the notice of the two visionaries in their own times. The shared discursive history and shared epistemological concerns,
perception certainly was at the heart of ancient Sanskrit poetics is not the same as literature in India or literatures in India.
as well, which obviously was one reason why the European view Very few accounts of Indian literary history are seen to maintain this

2558 Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006

vital distinction. The title of the influential Chicago University what one is to understand from this is that in spite of the enormous
primer, The Literatures of India, seems to recognise this point, scholarship that has been produced on Indian literature by schol-
although the individual essays clearly do not share this ars of various hues from the south Asian subcontinent, the
recognition.2 Literature in India, as any textbook history of Indian European scholarly attitude to this archive remains unchanged
culture would tell us, is as old as its painting or its sculpture, from what it was in the 19th century represented by the works
perhaps a little less old than its community life. Sustained schol- mentioned. All these works without exception also shared the
arly pursuit of the history of this literature, however, is of fairly class and caste bias of the tradition of Sanskrit-based Hindu
recent origin and would not go back beyond the dawn of the orthodoxy. Some present-day critics recognise this, as is
19th century. This indeed is the moment of the constitution of indicated by the following comment of Sheldon Pollock in his
Indian literature as a theoretical category. introduction to a recent anthology of essays on literary cultures
This certainly is not to deny the self-knowledge of the identity from south Asia. Making references to the early work in
of the several regional literatures in India by regional language Indology by western scholars starting from Hegel and Schlegel,
scholars in the past, though historiographic accounts of these Pollock says:
literatures too do not go far back beyond the early 19th century. Sanskrit was posited as the classical code of early India, congruent
In fact the first histories of most regional languages too get written with new linked conceptions of classicism and class. . . .The real
only during this time. It is around this time, again, that Indian plurality of literature in south Asia and their dynamic and long-
literature gets constituted as a self-validating body of knowledge. term interaction were scarcely recognised, except perhaps inci-
It has been pointed out that the first scholar to use this term was dentally by Protestant missionaries and British civil servants who
not an Indian, nor were Indian scholars particularly interested were prompted by practical objectives of conversion and control.7
in tapping the unifying potential of the term in the 19th century.
It was the German romantic theorist Wilhelm von Schlegal, who The Theoretical Category
in 1823 used it synonymously with Sanskrit literature.3 Since then
a number of western Indologists have used the term to refer to The works by western Indologists mentioned above would
the unified literature of India, mainly Sanskrit, but at times also, bring the story of the constitution of Indian literature down to
along with Sanskrit literature, literatures written in Pali and the the first quarter of the 20th century. It is now that we see Indian
several dialects of Prakrit. Very rarely did modern north Indian scholars show interest in the emerging genre and pick up the
languages like Bengali, Urdu or Hindi find a place in the accounts blueprint of what was virtually a project conceived in the west.
of these writers, though literary histories pertaining to some of Indian scholars who have theorised Indian literature in diverse
these linguistic cultures were appearing in parts of India during ways in the 20th century include K R Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri
this period. The strong tradition of Tamil literary culture that Aurobindo, Krishna Kripalani, Umashankar Joshi, V K Gokak,
had deep roots in entire south India or the Kannada tradition of Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Sujit Mukherjee, Sisir Kumar Das, G
a somewhat later period also went unrepresented in their works. N Devy and Aijaz Ahmad. Most of these scholars with the obvious
M Garcin de Tassys two-volume History of the Literature of exception of Aijaz Ahmad, whose sensitive and highly nuanced
Hindu and Hindustani (French original, 1839-47; revised, en- elaboration of the category of Indian literature is in effect an
larged and published in three volumes in 1870-71), Albrecht acknowledgement of the impossibility of positing such a cat-
Webers History of Indian Literature (German original, 1852), egory, arrive at the broad possibility of conceiving an Indian
George A Griersons Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan literature either as the expression of an essential Indian culture
(1889), Ernst P Horowitzs A Short History of Indian Literature or as the unity of discrete literary formations.8 The reformist-
(1907), Maurice Winternitzs three-volume History of Indian nationalist-modernity projects that were under way in all parts
Literature (German original, 1908-22) and Herbert H Gowens of India in the early 20th century acted as a great unifying force
History of Indian Literature (1931) are some of the literary at this juncture. So did the progressive literary movement (Indian
histories that contributed towards the constitution of the category Progressive Writers Association, IPWA), which launched in
of Indian literature.4 1939 a journal under the title New Indian Literature from Lucknow.
T R S Sharma in the preface to his three volume anthology Since its inception in 1954, the Sahitya Akademi, under the
of Ancient Indian Literature, is indirectly referring to the Sanskrit tutelage of Indias first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who
bias of early European scholars when he dwells upon the practical was also the first president of the Akademi, has been propagating
problems that he encountered in locating translations of literature the idea of the unity of Indian literature by using the slogan
from ancient India. He says: While many European scholars Indian literature is one though written in many languages. The
had translated entire works of Sanskrit, few of them had ventured title of the Akademis journal Indian Literature, echoing the
into Prakrit and Apabhramsa and none into Kannada.5 Even name of its short-lived IPWA forerunner, is more than symbolic
today European scholars of modern south Asian languages and in this sense.
literature feel compelled to legitimise themselves and their fields That Indian literature as a theoretical category was constituted
of study, working as they do in departments of south Asian studies in the 19th century would nowadays be disputed only by bigoted
at times designated even now as departments of Indology adherents of cultural revivalism. Many thinkers of liberal per-
that are dominated largely by classical Sanskrit scholars. This suasion can be seen, sometimes explicitly, but more often im-
is what one should infer from the introduction to a volume of plicitly, to be opposing this bigotry. Sisir Kumar Dass move
modern south Asian literature and film written by scholars working in publishing the last two volumes, the ones pertaining to the
in European universities in which the editors unambiguously state period since 1800, of his projected multi-volume history of Indian
that one of the motives behind the compilation of the volume literature can be read as an implicit criticism of this bigotry.9 Though
is the need to let the world know of the seriousness of their the reasons given for publishing the eighth and ninth volumes
discipline.6 The unabashed eurocentrism of this statement apart, ahead of the volumes pertaining to the earlier periods is the easy

Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006 2559

availability of material pertaining to the modern period, one analysis assumed that real and valuable contributions to Indian
cannot ignore the fact that in doing this he is also focusing on literature were made in ancient India, that is, in the past of India
the period when Indian literature actually came into being as an prior to the Islamic conquest. Very little of the present of literary
object of knowledge. Perhaps he is also suggesting that this India is explored in the literary histories mentioned above. Webers
objects chronological extension back into the past is yet to be History of Indian Literature discusses only the Vedic and Sanskrit
properly realised. This indeed is how all subject disciplines are periods of the Indo-Aryan language, while Winternitz surveys
conceived and constructed. An object of knowledge is constituted Vedic and Upanishadic literature as well as the writings in
as a discipline with well-charted boundaries and well-defined classical Sanskrit and Prakrit in his History. In doing this the
objectives in answer to certain political compulsions. Indian two were only following in the footsteps of Sir William Jones,
literature too, when constructed as a discipline, was meant to Indologist and the founder of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta,
answer certain political and ideological needs. who as early as 1786 had declared that in his studies he would
What are the ideological compulsions that rendered the con- be confining his researches downward to the Mohammedan
stitution of Indian literature imperative in the 19th century? A conquests at the beginning of the 11th century, but extend them
closer look at the nature of the scholarship produced on Indian upwards, as high as possible, to the earliest authentic records
literature during the period in question would help us to under- of the human species.10 Though some later scholars like George
stand this problem. The 19th century and after in Indian history, A Grierson have deigned to consider specimen texts from the
it may be remembered, is the period of colonialist and capitalist regional languages too, a good majority of early Indologists were
expansion, of social reform movements, of nationalist awakening resolutely opposed to the idea of treating works that belonged
and the freedom struggle leading finally to the countrys inde- to Indian regional literatures of the modern period as part of the
pendence. It is also the period of increasing modernisation of Orientalist canon.
the society with its attendant good and evil effects, of an ex- It is against this background that Saids general observations
panding English studies programme, of a proliferating print on the politics of the Orientalist scholarship assumes significance.
culture, of the democratisation of the reading public and, in the There are problems with Orientalism both in terms of theory and
sphere of literature, of an overall consolidation of the western methodology, that led to the assumption, widespread among post-
ideology of the aesthetic. The impact of these diverse develop- colonial thinkers today, of the presence of an ahistorically
ments can be seen imprinted in the kind of scholarship on Indian homogeneous other in parts of what is called the third world,
literature that got constituted during this period. though one might find it difficult to concur on the basis of this
The developments indicated above are too panoramic and with Aijaz Ahmads assessment of it as a deeply flawed
complex for us to do justice to all of them in an analysis of this book.11 An important reality that the book has allowed us to
kind. But well briefly examine three issues that are intricately see is the deep ideological complicity between Orientalism and
related to the question of Indian literature and see how they have the project of colonialism. This indeed is a complex question
interacted with one another to produce the kind of scholarship on which much has been written by researchers, historians and
associated with the category of Indian literature. We have already social scientists of all persuasions, so that it might be well-nigh
made a passing reference to the first of these in our preliminary impossible to summarise the arguments or keep track of the
remarks on the tradition of Sanskrit-based Hindu orthodoxy that direction in which the research is progressing.12 In fact, it is
animated much of the work connected with Indology. We shall possible that the conflicting interests of the European powers on
also examine the question of language that has played a crucial the Indian subcontinent during the 18th and 19th centuries might
role in the construction of the category. The co-option of the be said to have cast their shadow on the Orientalist discourse,
category by the nationalist discourse for the production of the though Said has nothing to say on this. Whatever little has been
metaphysics of a national literary sensibility will be the third issue done by recent researchers on this question is enough to indicate
under analysis. that this discourse was saturated from the very beginning with
the claims and counter-claims of rival colonial powers, especially
Orientalism and After the English and the French in the Indian context.13 It is the
presence of such competing interests that goes to make this body
Much of course has been written on western Indology and the of knowledge ideological and its complicity with colonialism
scholarship on Indian culture that it has generated. This especially real. The Orientalists refusal to recognise the value and authen-
after Edward Saids path-breaking critique of Orientalism was ticity of the several kinds of modern literature in Indian languages,
published in 1978. One certainly cannot underestimate the then, is to be read as a manifestation of this complicity. One of
enormous amount of research carried out on India by European the general studies on Indian literature by the Indologist Edwin
Orientalists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Much of what would Arnold, entitled Literature of India, was issued in 1902 from a
otherwise have been lost of classical Indian scholarship was press in New York called the Colonial Press. The suggestion
salvaged by the painstaking research of scholars like Charles might sound a little too cynical, but it would not be altogether
Wilkins, Albrecht Weber, William Jones, Henry Colebrooke, absurd to say that Colonial Press would have made a suitable
Nathaniel Halhed, Max Mueller and Maurice Winternitz. How- imprint for a great deal of the Indological material published
ever, as several later scholars have pointed out, there is an during the period even outside the New York press.
important lacuna in their work plan and their output, which is The above complicity can be seen at work, though at a less
too systematic and too consistent to be treated as an instance of conspicuous level, in the scholars handling of the language
casual oversight. This relates to the tacit concurrence that they question. This becomes important because this was the key issue
gave to the division of Indian history into a predominantly Hindu debated by the literati, especially the Anglicists and the Orientalists
ancient India, a Muslim-dominated medieval India and a British in both India and Britain, for over three decades in the early years
designed modern India. Further, the general framework of their of the 19th century till it was finally resolved by Macaulays

2560 Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006

Minute on Education (1835). The establishment in 1917 of of the first Indian novel in English, and Michael Madhusudan
Hindu College in Calcutta an institution meant to propagate Dutt, one of the early Indians to make a name for himself as
secular values through modern (English) education, but which an accomplished poet in English, both renounced, like Ngugi wa
nevertheless flaunted a non-secular banner in its name is a ThiongO of Kenya was to do a century later, their youthful
significant moment in this debate that has been characterised by enthusiasm for the English language and turned, at a more mature
contradictions and paradoxes. Outwardly the Orientalists were stage of their respective careers, to their own native language,
against the introduction of English in India in place of Sanskrit Bengali, and distinguished themselves as creative writers in that
and Persian. Perhaps they earnestly believed, contrary to the language.
position taken by many social reformers in India, that this was
a gravely mischievous step to take for the British administration The Language Question
in India. But the deep-seated identity of ideological interests
between the Orientalists and the British government on one hand History repeats, and not always as farce. This is what we are
and the Orientalists and the Anglicists on the other can be seen to gather from the recurrence of the debate on the feasibility of
in the refusal of all to honour the present of India represented using the English language by Indians for creative purposes in
by its regional languages. Looking at things in retrospect we post-independence India. But what scholars like Budhadev Bose
realise that the real dispute was not between the Orientalists and and P Lal could not prove through their theoretical perambu-
the Anglicists, but between regional or local cultures and the big lations in the 1950s and 1960s, the novelists of Rushdies gen-
event represented by the great tradition of Indian culture that both eration a few years later have shown through practice: that the
the Orientalists and the Anglicists in their own separate ways language question, framed as a question pertaining to the per-
propped up. Macaulay did not want to do business with the ceived spontaneity of creative expression, after all, was a non-
regional languages. As his Minute makes clear, the colonisers question as far as the politics of writing was concerned. One could
objective in spreading English education was to form a class of excel and prove to be a creative genius in an alien language,
persons who could be depended upon in interpreting the land evading in the process all questions pertaining to the politics of
and culture of India for the Britisher a class immortalised in writing. This observation gains immense value when we remem-
Macaulays oft-cited phrase, Indian in blood and colour, but ber that such politics was precisely what Bankimchandra and
English in taste and opinion. The Orientalists and the Anglicists M M Dutt were indirectly concerned with when they thought it
both concurred with this view enshrined in the Minute. One might fit to reject the English language as the medium of creative
perceive a subtle transition of intellectual authority taking place expression in the 19th century. And certainly, one should also
here, a symbolic exchange, so to say, between the past glories remember that the writers of Rushdies generation are working
of Sanskrit and the present powers of English. The Orientalists in an altered cultural environment in which literature itself has
and through their work the elite public opinion in India been enlisted in the service of an unscrupulous global and
appeared to be conceding the modernised, Anglicised present of globalised economic order by contemporary capitalism. Since
India to the colonial rulers in return for an acknowledgement this is not the place to go into the details of that development,
of the glories of the countrys Vedic and Sanskritic past, in a let us leave that aspect unelaborated for the present.
process that Nigel Leask has aptly described, in a related context, This problem concerning the language of literature will appear
reverse acculturation.14 The process involved a legitimisation to be more relevant in a discussion of Indian literature, as literature
of the colonial rule whose burden it was to recover the past glories is always written in a specific language. OV Vijayan who brought
and traditions of India that had fallen into decay arguably under about a radical change in the literary sensibility of the Malayalam
the Muslim rule. This perhaps is how Said should make sense readers in the 1960s with his groundbreaking novel Khasakinte
to us. For if we followed this logic, what Said said was that the Itihasam (1969), was in the habit of saying that one knows a
imperialists used the Orientalists intellectual mastery over region by its characteristic fauna. The variety of fish that one
Indias past to legitimise and reinforce their own physical control gets in Chennai will be different from what one gets in Mumbai,
of the present. Tunis or Manchester. A place name can act as a metaphor for
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and opinion. a whole lot of characteristics and this would include the smell
Macaulays telling phrase invites to be deconstructed in the of the fish one eats that make up the identity of the people
context of the debates on language carried out with reference who inhabit the place. Language, a system of metaphors, at a
to Indian literature. Was Indian literature, at the time of its certain level can also be treated as a metaphor for the system
constitution, fashioned out to cater to the taste of the English? built up around a place. One is known by the language one speaks.
One should assume it was indeed so, as the works that were This is one reason why theorists say that language is ideological.
circulated in the name of Indian literature in the 19th century What this implies for the theorists of Indian literature, however,
were all classics in Sanskrit that were translated and inasmuch is that an exclusive focus on the language of literature would
as translation constitutes misreading and misrepresentation render unsustainable formulations like a literature written in
misread and misrepresented. Here then is a cartography of several languages. One might talk about Hindi literature, Tamil
misreading whose founding principles have been the subjects of literature or Bengali literature, because these are kinds of lit-
debate from very early days. The debate was carried out with erature based on specific languages and linguistic cultures.
a great deal of vehemence in the first half of the 19th century, But can one talk about Indian literature, unless by that one
especially in relation to the rationale of developing an Indian means, as many 19th century Orientalists did, Sanskrit
literature written specifically in English. The history of Indian literature, or as several present-day western critics mean, Indian
English literature would reveal that all early Indian English English literature?15
writers suffered from a profound sense of divided linguistic This question emanates centrally from the politics of writing
identity, so much so that Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the author and in this sense is closely affiliated to the question that agitated

Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006 2561

the minds of the likes of MM Dutt and Bankimchandra in the change, growth and progress. It is an experience of unity binding
19th century. It is in this context that the observation regarding the entire humankind together, cutting across distinctions of class,
the Orientalist constitution of Indian literature becomes a fact caste, race, gender, language and nationality. Though individual
of critical significance. If the real specimens of Indian literature is important in this dispensation, one is an individual only in-
are to be found in the regional languages of India, the chimera asmuch as he often he, and seldom she crystallises within
called Indian literature that exists outside the nations himself the universal, humanistic values sacralised by modernity.
linguistic system must be construed as an invention of There indeed are contradictions, which account for the demoniac
somebody. The scholar Niharranjan Ray has been quite emphatic aspects in the writings of several European romantic and moder-
about this point. He says: nist writers of the past centuries. Marshall Berman, one of the
few commentators of modernity who gives a balanced evaluation
Literature is absolutely language-based, and language being a
cultural phenomenon, it is all but wholly conditioned by its locale
of it, defines it as:
and the socio-historical forces that are in operation through the a body of experience [that finds] ourselves in an environment
ages in that particular locale. If that be so, one may reasonably that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
argue that the literature of a given language will have its own ourselves and the world and, at the same time, that threatens
specific character of form and style, images and symbols, nuances to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything
and associations, etc.16 we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all
boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality,
of religion and ideology.18
Politics of Writing
Tradition, which is often placed in opposition to modernity
This brings us back to the questions of the politics of writing as its other, encompasses the obverse of the above attributes.
and the relation between ideology and literature that were raised Tradition epitomises ignorance, changelessness, narrow-
only incidentally in these pages. It may not be possible, either mindedness and lack of power. Traditional India was a compen-
theoretically or in terms of a cohesive methodology, to carry dium of all these vices in British historical accounts.19 The British
forward a sustained argument in support of the presence of an counted it as their historical responsibility as enlightened mem-
ontologically related body of knowledge with a shared discursive bers of the civilised world to change this situation. This is the
history called Indian literature. We can, however, do this by background of the colonialists grand project of reform and
invoking the ideology of nationalism and the sense of cultural the accompanying discourse of modernity, complex, contradic-
identity that the project of nationalism during the last phase of tory and elaborate, in which scholars from both India and
the colonial rule made room for. This precisely was what the Britain participated with varying degrees of commitment. It
Indian scholars, who took up the task of elaborating a concept would have been impossible for 19th and early 20th century
of Indian literature in the 20th century were aiming at. The Tamil scholars from India, whether of the Orientalist, Anglicist, re-
nationalist poet Subramania Bharati who said that the Indian formist or nationalist cast of mind, to remain uninfluenced by
nation speaks 18 languages, though her chintana [i e, thinking] this project and this discourse. The contradictions and complexi-
is one17 was articulating a nationalist position of an essential ties that we noticed in Indian responses to orientalism and
Indian spirit animating all the writings from the Indian subcon- nationalism are in fact, linked to the divided logic within mo-
tinent that was echoed later in the slogan of the Sahitya Akademi. dernity itself. That is why a Nehruvian nationalist slogan like
Though the full-fledged spirit of nationalism and the politics Indias unity lies in its diversity also becomes the credo of
implied by it emerge in India only at the turn of the century, Indian modernity. One need not be exceptionally intelligent to
it is possible to argue that the Indologists of the 19th century realise that the slogan Indian literature is one though written
were operating within the conceptual framework of the (Indian) in many languages is only the literary critical analogue of the
nation, however crude and vague that framework might have nationalist modernitys precept concerning Indias unity lying
been at that point in time. It is true that it was left for the in its diversity.
nationalists of the 20th century to elaborate that framework. But This genealogy of Indian literature, however, does not pre-
it was natural for several 19th century Orientalists, inspired as clude, as several scholars point out, the presence of myths, legends
they were by the spirit of the many newly emergent nations in and stories, as well as perhaps even patterns of narration of stories,
Europe vying with each other for cultural capital by making that have for centuries bound a variety of literature of India
claims on folk and literary traditions, to invent a glorious past together. This may be treated as an aspect of the dialectic of
for the culture of India that was so dear to them. India thus emerges Indias modernity. One might come across myths, motifs and
as a land-mass of divided interests in the present, but connected patterns of story telling that appear and reappear throughout India
by a common and glorious past. Indian literature, then, is both in both the ancient and medieval periods of its history. Scholars
a product of this constructed past and an active agent in the like Ayyappa Paniker would say that there is a specifically Indian
construction of that past. way of narrating stories that has existed in India from the earliest
The three issues examined above are also crucial for under- times.20 The Sanskrit stories in the Panchatantra and the epics
standing the dynamics of the modernity project in India. For while of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Pali Jatakakathas, the
talking about Indological scholarship, the debate on language and Brihatkatha stories written in the Paisachi language, the
the nationalist question, we are in a deeper sense, asking questions Gathasaptasati in Prakrit and the Cilappatikaram and
concerning the nature and spread of the colonialism-driven Manimekalai stories in Tamil have for centuries circulated across
modernity project and its impact on the countrys polity and the subcontinent in all languages in various forms and have
culture. Modernity is often regarded as a mindset rather than a remained a perennial source of inspiration for all Indian writers.
physical condition, or a mindset emerging from a physical In medieval times the Tamil and Kannada Bhakti tradition of
condition, that, in spite of its perils and contradictions, welcomes writing that spread from the southern regions of India towards

2562 Economic and Political Weekly June 24, 2006

the northern parts of the country also threw up patterns of feeling Essays on South Asian Literature and Film, Research School, Leiden,
and thinking that have affected the entire literature in the CNWS, 1998, p iii.
7 Sheldon Pollock, Introduction, Literary Cultures in History:
subcontinent. A process of synthesis and cross-fertilisation Reconstructions from South Asia, S Pollock (ed), Oxford University Press,
can be seen at work here, whose fruits in the form of great New Delhi, 2003, p 5.
imaginative literature have accrued not only to the people of India 8 Aijaz Ahmad, Indian Literature: Notes toward the Definition of a
but, as Umashankar Joshi observes, to the peoples of far-off Category, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literature, Oxford University
lands, making...the idea of Indian literature relevant from the Press, Delhi, 1992, pp 243-85. Throughout this essay Ahmad consistently
uses the term Indian Literature within inverted commas to draw attention
point of view of the foreign appropriators even in those early to its problematic identity.
days.21 9 See Sisir Kumar Das (ed), A History of Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi,
Joshis reference to the point of view of the foreign appro- New Delhi, 1991. The published volumes are Volume 8: 1800-1910
priators in the statement above is significant in that it draws Western Impact, Indian Response, 1991; Volume 9, 1911-1956 Struggle
focused attention on the single sense in which the concept of for Freedom: Triumph and Tragedy, 1995.
10 Quoted in G N Devy, After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian
Indian literature becomes meaningful today. One might invoke Literary Criticism, Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1992, p 5.
it as a theoretical category in order to signify the distinctiveness 11 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory 161, Ahmads chief objection is to Saids
of Indias literature in relation to the literature in the rest of the methodology, especially to his use of specimens of humanist scholarship
world. One posits it in opposition to the non-Indian literature to undermine the ideology of humanism that the Orientalist work embodies.
and from the perspective of the non-Indian reader. What we do Ahmad is also critical of Said for his dependence on a theorist like
Nietzsche who does not believe in languages ability to tell the truth in
when we take this position is to recognise Indias status as a nation revealing the truths about the Orient.
in the political map of the world.22 A nation obviously should 12 This has become a pet theme with several Marxist, post-colonial and,
have an army and a currency, but it should also have a literature more particularly, subaltern historians, though they do not share the
of its own. In the context, one certainly cannot present Indian same position or perspective on this and Marxist historians seem to be
literature as the expression of an essential Indian spirit or of a more guarded in their response. An assorted collection of the names
of such scholars would include Partha Chatterjee, Sudipta Kaviraj,
commonly shared sensibility, because the nation in question is Gyanendra Pande, K N Panikkar, Gyan Prakash, Tapan Raychaudhari
stable only on the map of the world. Its borders keep changing and Sumit Sarkar. The reader will come across references to the work
from writer to writer, from reader to reader and from subject to of some of them in this and the subsequent chapters of the present study.
subject. This is what one is to deduce from the lack of a perfect The work of researchers like Gauri Viswanathan, Javed Majeed, Nicholas
fit that exists between the images of India appearing in, or the Thomas and Rumina Sethi has also led to a new understanding of the
aspects of this question that were not in the agenda of Saids project.
nations constructed by, Saadat Husain Manto, Mahasweta Devi, See Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and
Gopinath Mohanty, Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, Laxman British Rule in India, Columbia University Press, New York, 1989;
Gaikwad, Bama, VKN, U R Anantha Murthy and Shashi Tharoor, Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings; James Mills, The History of
to mention a few representative Indian writers from various British India and Orientalism, Clarendon, Oxford, 1992; Nicholas
languages. No one would dare to talk about an essential Indian Thomas, Colonialisms Culture: Anthropology, Travel and
Government, Polity, Cambridge, 1994; Rumina Sethi, Myths of the
spirit running through the works of these writers who share the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation, Clarendon,
same nationality and perhaps the same period of writing, but Oxford, 1999.
whose histories, contexts, mindsets, experiences, lifestyles, lan- 13 This is a question on which more research is to be undertaken. There
guages and sensibilities are different, from the other. These is some discussion of this issue in chapter 2 of Nigel Leasks book on
writers dwell in different Indias, and to speak of them as sharing romantic poetry. See Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the
East: Anxieties of Empire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
a common culture and a common sensibility is to beguile oneself. 1992, pp 103-08.
If one still wants to talk about a common Indian literature with 14 Nigel Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East, p 9.
reference to these writers, one might say, twisting somewhat 15 When Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West compiled an anthology of
the spirit of the Sahitya Akademi motto regarding the oneness Indian fiction and published it on the occasion of the 50th year of Indias
of Indian literature, that they are writers divided by the same independence, they did not consider specimens of Indian language
literature worthy of inclusion in the anthology. See S Rushdie and E West
literature. -29 (eds), The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-97, Vintage,
New York, 1997.
Email: ppravee@sify.com 16 Quoted in Sujit Mukherjee, Towards a Literary History of India, pp 14-
15; and in Umashankar Joshi, The Idea of Indian Literature, p 11.
17 Quoted in Umashankar Joshi, The Idea of Indian Literature, p 9.
Notes 18 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity, Simon and Schuster, New York,1982, p 15.
1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, 19 See, for example, James Mill, The History of British India, Baldwin,
Cambridge, Mass, 2000, p xii. Cradock and Joy, London, 1817 and Vincent A Smith, The Early History
2 Edward C Dimock, Jr et al, The Literatures of India, Chicago University of India, Clarendon, Oxford, 1904.
Press, Chicago and London,1974. 20 See Ayyappa Paniker, Indian Narratology, Indira Gandhi Centre for Arts,
3 Umashankar Joshi, The Idea of Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2003.
New Delhi, 1990, p 7; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes Nations 21 Umashankar Joshi, The Idea of Indian Literature, p 26.
Literatures, Verso, London, 1993, p 340. 22 Though scholars like Arjun Appadurai have started talking about a post-
4 The excellent bibliography that Sujit Mukherjee has provided at the end nation phase in global culture, this seems to be by and large a
of his pioneering literary historical account of India, Towards a Literary diasporic obsession, at least for the present. Appadurai, however,
History of India, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Simla, 1975, pp 92-103, advances an interesting theory of historical rupture which takes
is an exhaustive listing of work done on the history of Indian literature media and migration to be crucial for contemporary society. See for
in the colonial period. this argument that is also linked up with the question of modernity,
5 T R S Sharma, Preface, Ancient Indian Literature: An Anthology, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions
T R S Sharma et al (eds), Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2000, pp 1:12. of Globalisation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and
6 Vasudha Dalmia and Theo Damsteegt, Introduction, Narrative Strategies: London, 1996.

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