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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


Let me suggest something very simple, but something that I think is essential.  One way for academic critics to contribute to this process of changing our sedimented cultural habits is by resolving to write and speak lucidly, avoiding unnecessary jargon.   This change in our customary manner of speaking and writing may make us more rigorous, in my view, since it will make our ideas more accessible to non-academic readers and we have to respond to their queries, critical comments, and even imaginative reconstructions of what we are proposing.  Such a change in our language is essential especially if we are striving to create more democratic spaces for criticism where “high” and “low” discourses are not kept separate and insulated from one another.  Imagine the pedagogical possibilities for a second: students in our classes could be more like performers and audience members at a pala or nautanki performance, responding to the texts from cultures not their own with humor and openness, unafraid to take risks and to make mistakes, extending the text’s implications in new ways.  I remember how delighted I was when one of my students in my Modern Indian Novel course at Cornell responded to the narrator of Six Acres by saying: “This guy is exactly like Stephen Colbert, except that he is from late-19th century India!”

Q: A central theme of CML is alternative modernities and you have also explored that theme in your analysis of the Lakshmi Purana.  What is the importance of alternative modernities for our current project of world literature?

SPM: The recent work on alternative modernities, which I have been reading and learning from, is part of an interdisciplinary project that originated in conferences and publications on “Multiple Modernities” and “Early Modernities.”   It is inspired by work done by people like the sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt and, later, by the important interventions of Sheldon Pollock and others.  In postcolonial studies, of course, Dilip Gaonkar and Dipesh Chakravarty brought the theme to prominence, and Charles Taylor did valuable work as well.  In India, scholars at Banaras Hindu University led by Sanjay Kumar, Archana Kumar (both from the English Department) and Raj Kumar (from Hindi) have organized major conferences on this subject over these past few years, and this year they are collaborating with scholars from China (and Indian historians of China, such as Kamal Sheel) to put together innovative seminars extending those themes.  The basic idea is that the dominant form of modernity we know today, as it has been defined by the rise of capitalism in Europe, is not the only kind of modernity the world has known.  In fact, part of the excitement of intellectual projects like this is to produce, through historical and cultural research, reasonably cogent pictures of a non-capitalist modernity.

I’ve argued in a few places that while this project is a fundamentally interdisciplinary one, the study of literature can make a special contribution to it.  In periods that we traditionally call “pre-modern,” literature often provides the best evidence of non-dominant layers of culture and thought, alternative values that may remain invisible if we look only at the socio-economic trends.  Read through the lens of alternative modernities, literary texts open up new historical archives and suggest tantalizing perspectives on a past we thought we knew well.  And of course the corpus that is traditionally considered literary will itself change – for we will include in it mahapuranas in Sanskrit and Kathakali folk performances in Malayalam, orally transmitted proverbs in Tuka’s Marathi as well as vivah geet (wedding songs sung by women) in 19th century Bhojpuri.

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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
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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