Conversation with Satya 6

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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

Q: In your introduction to Six Acres and a Third you talk about how Senapati challenges the reader to be “active” rather than a passive consumer of a social reality presented to him or her, a reality that is pre-made and fully formed. Part of the startling modernity of Senapati’s Six Acres and a Third (as well as, we would argue, of Balram Das’s 16th century feminist Lakshmi Purana, which you have also analyzed in detail) lies in their meta-fictional narrative form, and particularly in the collaborative activist role these texts impose on the reader in performing their critique of existing structures of social and political power. We are intrigued by your reading of this role as the ascription of epistemic/narrative authority where the act of sifting fable from fact and ideological posturing from truth emerges as “epistemic virtue.” Senapati’s strategy of unsettling the reader is both empowering and disorienting. Would you agree that the kind of intellectual nimbleness in the realist narrative in these texts, and the expectations it places on the reader of a certain kind of ethical interrogation of themselves as individuals and of social practices and institutions, seems to emerge almost as an ethical imperative?

SPM: Balaram Das’s feminist and anti-caste purana is a living tradition in Orissa (now officially spelled Odisha, by the way, after the November 2011 Parliamentary legislation). The Lakshmi Purana is read ritually in the month of Margashira by women in every Hindu household, in just about every village and town. Balaram Das was a radical saint-poet and his primary achievement in this poem is to have created this new subversive tale and a corresponding social tradition: for over 450 years, women have been reciting this text, discussing it with other women, and analyzing the story’s anti-caste and feminist implications. This tradition creates a radical social and political space, one that can be used for all kinds of progressive purposes.

Senapati’s novel may or may not have come out of the same activist tradition (although at least one feminist scholar, Bidyut Mohanty of Delhi University, has argued that it was influenced indirectly by the Lakshmi Purana). But its narrator is more than a neutral conduit for the story. Much more important than the story is the narrator’s stance as a wily but trenchant social critic, and it is this that readers learn to appreciate as they read and reread the novel. The wit and humor do serious critical and epistemic work. Part of what I wanted to show, aligning myself with such Oriya (now “Odia”) critics as Rabi Shankar Mishra, who had already provided a Bakhtinian and Derridean reading of the novel, is that the center of the text’s energy lies in its reinvention of both language and narrative mode. It is much more than a story about a landlord’s rapacity. (By the way, U. R. Ananthamurthy saw this quite early, even though he read Six Acres only in translation.) Senapati’s novel is a realist achievement on a number of levels. As Sisir Kumar Das and others have said, it provides a detailed and accurate picture of colonial Indian society from the rural perspective. But, I argued in my introduction, the accuracy of this picture is not primarily descriptive but rather critical and analytical.

Q: There is a stageist mentality in debates around literary realism that operates on a linear notion of time within which each piece of literature builds on its immediate predecessor. Yet you seem to align yourself with non-linear notions of literary-historical time by stating in your critical introduction that the realism of Chha Mana Atha Guntha “is closer to the reflexive postmodernism of a Salman Rushdie than it is to the naturalism of a Mulk Raj Anand.” Would you agree that the stageist notion of literary realism belonged to an earlier era, when realism was too closely bound up with the stages of history associated with Hegelian Marxism? Conversely, new work on literary realism in world literature is accompanied by a notion of world literary time that deploys the idiom of anticipations, of subversions of linear time. The political power of literary realism depends in great measure on the relation between realism, temporality and human history, hence our question.

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Essays in this Forum

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

Asia in My Life
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The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization
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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
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Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature?
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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