Conversation with Satya 15

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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

SPM: I agree with what you say. One way out of the chauvinist model, which has become our default model in India, is to decide in advance that we have to go beyond monolingualism, not just monocultural provincialism. We have no trouble studying one Indian language with English or even French, but it would help if we could study, say, two or more Indian linguistic traditions comparatively. That is exactly what Indian scholars who advocate the idea of a “comparative Indian literature” have been suggesting for years now. Our writers have always read one another, even when they only had access to translations. But critics and scholars have not been as flexible or nimble, at least in recent decades. Most of us end up working within one linguistic tradition and then in English (and, in some cases, Sanskrit).

It is humbling to realize that bi-lingualism and cross-linguistic dialogue were reasonably common phenomena earlier in India. Let me give you one instance, out of many. I have just started working on Sarala Das’s Bichitra Ramayana, which is the first mahakavya of Odia literature, composed in the early decades of the 15th century. It is a fascinating version of the Ramayana, a subaltern text of sorts, written with Sita as the narrative’s center of gravity. Now, Sachidananda Mishra, who is the foremost authority on this text, points out in his introduction that as early as the 17th century there was a Telugu translation of this text, and since then there have been four more such translations. The connections between the literary cultures of northern Andhra and southern Odisha are well known, but to discover that there were five translations into Telugu of the Bichitra Ramayana is to come to see how vibrant the bi-lingual culture was on the border of modern Andhra and Odisha, a culture that did not depend on grants from Delhi via the national Sahitya Akademi! These translations were done because there was a reading community interested in such texts, a community that did not see linguistic borders as terribly significant, or at least not as an obstacle to the give-and-take of literary and cultural conversation. V. Narayana Rao has pointed out in several talks that the rise of English in the university curriculum during colonial rule led to a devaluation of the regional languages, with English and Sanskrit (our ancient past!) edging out the study of the modern Indian linguistic traditions. As a result, he argues, insularity and the kind of monolingualism you are identifying came to take the place of the vital cross-regional cultural exchanges that existed in precolonial times.

The point in exploring cross-linguistic literary clusters is not only to discover influences but also, as Ananthamurthy suggested in his 2000 lectures at Cornell, to explore significant similarities and differences in the use of language and of narrative mode, as well as differences in ideological perspective. Ananthamurthy’s own focus was on the contrast between Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third and Tagore’s Gora, and he wanted his audience to consider how different both novels are in their uses of language and dialectal registers, especially the use of “pure” vs. everyday or demotic language. That is just one example, of course, but it suggests a way of doing comparative textual analysis across regions and literary historical traditions. Close textual analysis is essential for comparative studies of this kind.

Q: It is interesting that you refer to Matthew Arnold when you criticize the race-based view that underlies 19th century European conceptions of literary history. But the almost spiritual function Arnold ascribed to literary criticism is akin to the ethical imperative in the call you and Ananthamurthy make to perform a vigorously critical comparative reading in the making of a truly egalitarian world lit.

SPM: I have never been averse to the idea of talking about the ethical implications of the various critical approaches to literature, by the way. That isn’t all there is to the study of literature, but as in other areas of life ethical considerations are involved in so many of the choices we make – about which texts to focus on, where to devote our time and energy, etc. Also, while I think Arnold’s conception of national literary traditions is limited by the racial and nationalist ideas that were current in Europe in his time, I would not have too much trouble with his focus on the role literature plays in cultural pedagogy. Literature does indeed play that role, and the writings of critics – nonacademic readers, magazine reviewers, and professional scholars – can shape the discussions in productive ways. The best way to facilitate such a discussion today – going beyond Arnold’s ideological blinkers — is to democratize literary criticism as much as possible, to take it out of stuffy seminar rooms, for instance, and bring it back to coffee houses and union halls and our traditional village gathering places. For centuries, texts like Jagannath Das’s Odia Bhagavata have been read and discussed in communal spaces called “Bhagavata Tungis” in Odisha, and there are similar institutions in other regions of India. Popular performance traditions such as pala and Ramlila are similar venues where critical ideas are articulated, and it would be wonderful to imagine these critical spaces – from the Ramlila performance to the academic seminar at the University of Pittsburgh or Bombay – as somehow connected, but not in a hierarchical way. If the Bhagavata and Ramcharitmanas can be read in popular public spaces, there is no reason why Godaan or Samskara cannot be appreciated, discussed and criticized in such spaces as well. Perhaps one day we will see literary criticism occupy an important place in popular education, the kind of education for empowerment championed by people like Paulo Freire. The discussion of literature, adequately democratized, can contribute to cultural decolonization and help develop attitudes and habits of autonomy and critical thinking.

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Essays in this Forum

Rethinking the Global South
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

From Indian Literature to World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty
by Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

Asia in My Life
by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization
by Duncan Mceachern Yoon

The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu
by Sanjay Kumar

Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature
by Gurminder K. Bhambra

Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies
by Tilottoma Misra

Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response
by Shivani Jha

Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
by E. V. Ramakrishnan

Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular
by Purushottam Agrawal

West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism
by Jerome Teelucksingh

Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred 
by Fatima Sadiki