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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


We achieve objectivity by looking at the epistemic implications of different subjective perspectives, of our cultural biases, ideologies, and social locations. In exploring these issues, I was learning from debates in analytic philosophy surrounding the work of Thomas Kuhn, the historian and philosopher of science.

Q: So both philosophical realism and literary realism are concerned with some form of objectivity?

SPM: Yes, there clearly is a similarity between philosophical realism and literary realism because the latter, much like the former, often seeks a more objective view of (social and cultural) reality, and realist writers often talk about how they are trying to correct the representations of the dominant genres and conventions.  You see evidence of that view in, for instance, George Eliot’s call to go beyond what she calls “fancy” (a fanciful representation is so “easy,” she says) and in Senapati’s implicit critique of Lal Behary Day’s static, orientalist (“easy”) representation of the Indian village.  Early realist writers say they are trying to achieve greater fidelity to things as they are – that is, going beyond existing representations that are ideological or distorted for some other reason.  Their concern is with greater objectivity or greater truth than what the hegemonic perspectives allow us to glean – but it is not with some notion of absolute descriptive fidelity to nature.  The best realist writers tend to provide an analysis of reality, and their redescriptions of the world are meant to support their analysis.

While there is a clear analogy to be drawn between the project of philosophical or epistemological realism and that of some strands of literary realism, no necessary connection exists between theoretical postmodernism (which includes what we call poststructuralism) and literary postmodernism.   Literary postmodernism refers to the textual, and in particular narrative, features and conventions that literary historians have identified as having emerged after the decline of literary modernism.  Literary postmodernism is a term drawn from literary history whereas theoretical postmodernism is an epistemological, and more generally philosophical, stance or view.

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