Conversation with Satya 7

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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur

SPM: Yes, we definitely need to go beyond naïve models of progress and development in literature and culture. So instead of seeing the history of the Indian novel as one of steady progress toward greater and greater sophistication, from crude realism to self-conscious postmodernism, magical realism, etc., we have to become more aware of the levels of analytical and epistemic work that realism of various kinds have done, as they have engaged their times – their realities – in textually specific ways.

Another – and more complex – model can be derived from the way literature often anticipates the discoveries of critical social science. This is certainly true of the realist novel in India. Vasudha Dalmia makes this point about Premchand in her preface to the English translation of Godaan. Dalmia and others are right: literature often anticipates by decades the insights and findings of historians and social thinkers, and we literary critics can help build a multi-disciplinary project that will explore what we may call, echoing E. P. Thompson’s 1966 Times Literary Supplement essay, the “literary view from below.” (Thompson’s famous manifesto was titled “History From Below,” as you know.) By the way, the 2006 special section of EPW that Harish Trivedi and I co-edited alluded to that historiographical project by using the phrase “literary view from below” in the title – and so did the two comparative Indian literature conferences that we co-organized (with the political scientist Manoranjan Mohanty) in India and the U.S. — at the University of Delhi in January 2007 and at Cornell in May 2008.

Q: You have encouraged readers to think of Senapati’s realism as more “analytical” than “descriptive.” The notion of analytical realism you propose appears to have had two kinds of influence. Firstly, analytical realism functions as a placeholder for dissatisfaction with received ways of thinking about realism. We see evidence of this in the work of Sawyer, Mohapatra and Narayana Rao, among others: realism signifies their reasoned unease with the spectrum of intellectual positions available to the critic. There is in their work a refusal to abandon the term realism while putting it to work in altogether new ways. Secondly, analytical realism radically alters the protocols of analysis in novel studies, since we no longer have to try to fit realist novels in Indian and African vernaculars into available categories of European realism.

SPM: The distinction between descriptive and analytical realism is meant to echo the distinction Georg Lukács made between novels that are “naturalistic,” with plenty of descriptive details but without explanatory depth, and those other novels (such as Balzac’s) that are “realist” in a deeper sense, since they provide accounts of underlying social and historical trends, and of forces that are causally more salient than what we perceive on the surface of a given culture. Lukács’s distinction is valuable, even though his own application of his theoretical insight to works of literature was not always successful. His tastes limited him, and his responses – in particular to some early modernist writers in Europe – are clunky and misleading. But for our purposes it is useful to focus on the distinction between a more descriptive realist novel and a more analytical one, since it allows us to appreciate more fully the epistemic work novels perform – even at the level of their formal innovations. I argued – and many critics have developed this point – that Senapati’s narrator is a major literary invention, drawing as it does on oral and socio-cultural traditions, and it is Senapati’s narrative mode that enables him to create a deeper form of realism than would be possible through mere mimesis, through faithful description of the changing surfaces of social phenomena. The narrator of Six Acres forces us to be active readers, engaged in decoding not so much the details of the plot as the social prejudices and ideologies that distort our understanding of our world. The novel can be called “postmodernist” in a literary-critical sense, but its achievement is profoundly realist – in the philosophical sense of the term.

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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
by Sanjay Kumar

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