Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular
Purushottam Agrawal
I could not agree more with Satya Mohanty, when he says, in his 2012 interview, that “Read through the lens of alternative modernities, literary texts open up new historical archives and suggest tantalizing perspectives on a past we thought we knew so well.“ He does know it well, having “read“ the 16th-century Odia Lakshmi Purana “through the lens of alternative modernities.“1 He has rightly observed elsewhere, “Crucial features of modernity can be disaggregated; they can even be recombined in a number of different ways, shaped by differences in sociocultural context. So, if we can find modern values and ideas articulated in socioeconomic systems very different from eighteenth and nineteenth century European capitalism, part of the challenge for us as scholars is to trace the provenance of such values and ideas in the non-European contexts and to examine the alternative institutions and cultural forms that supported them.“2 I came to the same realization through my study of Kabir (d. 1518 C.A.), a very powerful and influential poet, whom colonial historiography had turned into an “Indian Luther,“ but one who had failed and had hence been marginalized. This was a part of the larger exercise undertaken by colonial power and the colonial episteme. The idea of India as a strange place with no “history“ (as we know it– unfolding through conflicts, interrogations and negotiations) was invented, and colonial literati were made to internalize it. This internalization was of course an exercise in collaboration. This invented India was termed as “eternal“ in polite idiom and “stagnant“ in the terms of academic historiography. This is no place to go into the otherwise interesting history of this “invention.“ Suffice here to note its outcome, which has become part of the popular and even academic commonsense of a majority of Indians. Some people are quite convinced that India was a veritable paradise on earth before the British came. In this narrative, the foreigners are held solely responsible for all our ills and problems. That is to say, we cannot solve any of these problems because we are not even capable of creating problems of our own. On the other hand, some are equally convinced that the colonizers brought life and enlightenment to the stagnant, ahistorical and doomed Indian society. As a matter of fact, Kabir’s was not a failed, marginalized voice, which somehow sprang up ahead of its times. He was one of the most important moral agents and historical actors – who were articulating India’s own modernity. He and many like him spoke in the vernaculars, and not in the “language of gods“ (Sanskrit) or in the language of lords (i.e. Persian). They were nonetheless respected and listened to, not only by the poor but also by powerful and influential segments of society, particularly the merchants. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
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 |