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

Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur


Paul Sawyer has developed this idea in writing about George Eliot and Senapati, as has Himansu Mohapatra in comparing Six Acres with Premchand’s Godaan.  See, also, Ulka Anjaria’s 2006 EPW essay on Shrilal Shukla and Senapati, as well as Jennifer Harford Vargas’s comparative study of Senapati and Garcia Marquez.  There are similar ideas in Narayana Rao’s comparative analysis as well as in Tilottoma Misra’s work on Barua and Senapati (Barua was writing some 20 years before Senapati, in Asamiya).  My view is that every one of these essays I’ve mentioned can inspire a multi-year research project – leading to dissertations and books that explore the question of descriptive vs. analytical realism in greater historical detail and depth, and we will learn a lot about literary realism, especially in the Indian context, through such studies.  The same can be said about Sangari’s 1980s essay on Rushdie and García Marquez, which I mentioned earlier, or Mukti Lakhi Mangharam’s detailed comparative analysis, in EPW (2010), of the Odia adivasi poet Bhima Bhoi and Swami Vivekananda.

Q: So, to return to the second implication of your point about analytical realism: realism in 19th Century India is a literary mode that is sometimes used to explore the working out of an anti-colonial critical consciousness from subaltern perspectives? You are in effect shifting attention –from European critical concerns about objective reality, social conflict, rise of the bourgeois classes and the bourgeois world view – towards a greater focus on realist projects underlying the narrator’s voice, tone, all seeing eye, mode of satiric commentary, withholdings and silences and disclosures. Is realism at one level simply the close encounter between the performative voice of such traditions as the Odia and Assamese pala and the anti-babu critic of Sanskritic and modern learning? Where can this kind of analysis of realism take us?  What can it make us see?

SPM: I don’t want to generalize too quickly about all realist novels, since there is a lot more historical and textual work that needs to be done.  But one strand of this kind of analysis will certainly tell us a lot about subaltern agency, and take us beyond the kind of hyperbolic skepticism we often hear about when subaltern thoughts and ideas are discussed in literary-theoretical circles.  So while it may be wise to suggest that in some contexts, for reasons that may be partly obscure, the subaltern’s perspective is rendered invisible by the dominant discourses about it, an overly general—decontextualized—skepticism about subalterns is unwarranted.  The question about subaltern agency can never be purely, or primarily, a theoretical one.  There is a lot of empirical knowledge that we lack, and we need reflexive and context-sensitive theoretical tools to gain access to some of it.  Here is where the work of historians and other social scientists is so important, and the kind of literary analysis the critics you refer to are doing becomes relevant.  There isn’t a trace of that hyperbolic skepticism in such classic works as Thompson’s on the “moral economy of the crowd” (1971) or in James Scott’s on “weapons of the weak.”  And take a look at how careful and reflexive Eric Hobsbawm is when he writes about “grassroots history,” grounding skepticism in real contexts of research, ideological prejudice, and theoretical method (the essay, first published in 1985, is called “History From Below – Some Reflections”).  So the kind of exaggerated skepticism we often see in some poststructuralist circles is not the only form skepticism can take.  There are alternatives to a general, broad-brush skeptical stance.  Here is where literary critics can make useful interventions.  Before literary critics conclude that the subaltern cannot, in fact, speak, or that we won’t be able to understand what s/he is saying, it would be good to ask, for instance, what literary forms – drawing on oral performative traditions – show us about the kinds of critique that have been developed in our rich regional, vernacular literatures.  Reading the Asamiya writer Hemchandra Barua together with Fakir Mohan Senapati can help focus our analysis of this, as is suggested by Tilottoma Mishra’s critical essay in CML.  (Or you could extend the analysis of orality and the novel across continents by doing a comparative study of the narrative mode of Senapati’s novel and that of Amos Tutuola’s 1952 work The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which is based on Yoruba folktales.)

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Essays in this Forum

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