Conversation with Satya 3

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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

In the mid 1980s I was working, like many others around me, to integrate the tantalizing claims of poststructuralist theory with the various traditions of materialist and social-critical thought with which we were all familiar – Marxism, feminism, etc. But I came to realize that while poststructuralism, as we knew it in the context of literary studies, raised interesting questions it had no way of providing adequate answers to some of them.

The deepest of these questions arose from poststructuralism’s critique of foundationalism, exemplified in Derrida’s deconstruction of the Husserlian concept of “presence,” a concept that had taken for granted that there may be a bedrock level of experience or observation where we can be absolutely certain that we know something. Poststructuralism’s critique of foundationalism was enabled, as was the case with earlier developments in analytic philosophy, by the recognition that no such bedrock level of experience exists, since everything – an individual’s personal experiences to scientific observations in the laboratory – is available to us only in profoundly mediated ways. Everything, as philosophers of science say, is necessarily theory-dependent.

The first major question that arose from this recognition is this: Since all knowledge is so profoundly mediated, isn’t objective knowledge impossible to achieve? Isn’t all knowledge relative to a given perspective? Isn’t, as the argument sometimes goes (see Lyotard on this topic), a kind of epistemological relativism the most reasonable position to adopt?

This is the question I wrote about in the late 1980s – on relativism, and whether it was a viable and desirable epistemological stance (my essay on this, “Us and Them,” appeared in The Yale Journal of Criticism in 1989, later anthologized in a few places). Writing this essay led me to an examination of recent versions of philosophical realism, which posit that objective knowledge is possible – but that our early twentieth century notions of foundationalist certainty need to be abandoned and our notion of objectivity needs to be reconfigured, made more hermeneutical and reflexive. On this view, genuine objectivity is not mere neutrality.

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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
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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