From Indian Literature to World Literature:
A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


SPM: Cultural chauvinism is toxic for the student of literature.  I think some forms of cultural chauvinism in India originated during British rule as a kind of mimicry, initially a defense against cultural denigration by the colonial masters.  The irony is that the defense (“my culture is also great, much like those of your European nations”) in fact drew on the ugliest forms of ethnocentrism and the racist logic found in 18th and 19th century Europe (“we are culturally superior to them, the barbarians, the ‘mlecchas’ – and the languages of our less civilized neighbors are worth less than our Sanskritized Aryan languages”).  Think, in this context, about the French aristocrat Gobineau’s racist theories but also about the race-based assumptions in Matthew Arnold’s views about “national” literary cultures (e.g., his essays on Celtic literature). Even more relevant are the debates in 18th century England over the need to “standardize” English by classicizing it.  Spurious linguistic theories were closely tied to race- and class-based anthropological theories, and it is these ideas that are marshaled by ideologues in India a century later. Intellectual historians have looked critically at these ideas (e.g., about “Englishness” or “Frenchness”) in the European context, but not enough attention had been paid to the role they played in India.  At least one historian, Joya Chatterji, has argued that in some parts of India cultural chauvinism developed in the 19th and 20th centuries as communalist sentiments hardened into ideologies about identity, and so chauvinism has a basis in the class interests of the newly-rich zamindars, who were mostly upper-caste Hindus.  As early as 1968, Broomfield wrote insightfully about the cultural attitudes of this parvenu class.  Clearly, much more work needs to be done on this topic by progressive critics and historians.

The tragedy for readers of literature is that chauvinism as a form of mimicry produced a distorted view of literature, turning it into a crude ideological weapon – “my literary history goes back farther than yours”; “this great author from the past belongs to my linguistic tradition, not yours,” etc.  This ideology is toxic even for those readers who belong to the literary traditions that are ostensibly being championed or praised.  Unfortunately for everyone, versions of this kind of chauvinism have often become the default position in the study of our regional literatures since Independence.  Instead of studying literature, we engage in an unsavory ideological project – superficial idolatry of authors replaces careful analysis and interpretation of texts, and it produces a deliberately insular focus on one’s own linguistic tradition based on the assumption that literary criticism is an ongoing competition among different traditions vying for prominence.  This ideology sanctions, and perhaps even requires, ignorance about other modern literary traditions in India – although, of course, it can easily coexist with knowledge of Sanskrit or European literatures.  The earliest histories of regional literature and monographs on individual authors published by the national Sahitya Akademi in Delhi provide ample evidence of the kind of phenomenon I am talking about, and it will take several Ph.D. dissertations to analyze those early trends from the perspective I am suggesting here.

We don’t yet have an adequate — and adequately tactful — moral language to talk about chauvinism as a cultural or ideological phenomenon, so all we do is raise an eyebrow or exchange looks when we see it manifested in public – at a conference or in publications.  But brave attempts to identify it have been made by leading literary figures.  See Girish Karnad’s 2001 article in The Hindu, for instance, as well as his 2009 piece titled “Tagorolatry” in The Book Review.  At stake here, as Karnad points out, is the question of how to define the canon of “Indian literature” as well as the responsibility of editors of literary anthologies.  But there is also the more general issue of how to interpret individual works of Indian literature, since a chauvinist perspective produces distorted readings of texts and authors.  Imagine trying to read Dickens with the primary goal of showing how great English culture is!  Or reading Tuka Ram with the sole purpose of celebrating the greatness of Marathi culture, and Sarala Das, who wrote subaltern versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the 15th century, to exemplify the glorious literary history of Odisha!  Such attempts would be wrong-headed because they prevent us from seeing the rich cultural crosscurrents that shape medieval and early modern Indian culture, the culture of the Natha yogis and the itinerant bards who roamed from region to region creating a truly new moment in the subcontinent’s history.  To read Tuka Ram and Sarala Das in narrowly literary-historical terms is in effect to clip their visionary wings, to be blind to the subversive social power of their work.  But our modern version of cultural chauvinism may convince students of literature that this is exactly how both writers should be read since this is how literary histories in other regions are being written.

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