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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


You can be a postmodernist novelist or poet, and that is how editors may categorize you to fit you in the appropriate anthology.  But whether you are a postmodernist in the philosophical sense would not be clear from that fact alone.  A writer can be using postmodern literary conventions while pursuing a philosophical-realist project – a project that seeks to unmask social distortions and reveal a more objective version of reality.  You can adopt the narrative modes of Pynchon or Rushdie and simultaneously pursue George Eliot’s goals in writing fiction.  You can play with and even subvert conventions of literary realism and still be a philosophical realist at heart.  In the mid-1980s, Kum Kum Sangari wrote a superb analysis of Rushdie and García Marquez along these lines, urging readers to reconsider their notion that the latter’s use of magical realism is anti-realist.  And if you read Jennifer Harford Vargas’s 2009 essay on García Marquez in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), you will see the same basic thesis.  Both critics argue in effect that magical realist writers often have a realist epistemology, which means that they are trying to get closer to objective social reality.

This is one of the reasons why Fakir Mohan Senapati’s novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha, written in colonial India in the late 1890s, is such an interesting text.  It is written in an allusive, parodic mode that suggests what we literary critics call postmodernism, but underneath that mode – and indeed through those very subversive narrative conventions – Senapati develops a rich descriptive and analytical account of colonial Indian society and culture.  So he is a (philosophical) realist writing in a mode that has postmodernist characteristics – and this is sixty or seventy years before the advent of the postmodernist novel in the West!

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