Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies
Tilottoma Misra
The project of applying a “totalizing and classificatory grid“1 to segregate, group or redefine human beings as countable categories was a colonial enterprise. It succeeded in hedging in people and dividing the cultures of the colonies into exclusive regions. In pre-colonial India cultures were fluid, flexible and inclusive. A sixteenth-century Vaishnava poet from Assam could travel to Puri, in Odisha, and share his thoughts with poets and writers who were visiting the Jagannath temple from other regions of the subcontinent and then go on to write some of his best devotional poems with this enriched experience. Linguistic or cultural chauvinism was an unknown concept at that time. Languages and cultures crossed political boundaries and each major language had a variety of sub-groups that existed in their own right without being categorized as “apabhramsha.“ If this process had continued unhampered, possibly a truly “Indian“ literature would have taken shape over the centuries. But, the disjuncture that took place with the advent of colonial rule, bringing with it a print culture that privileged some languages and cultures over others, brought about a new cultural chauvinism that encouraged a tendency to consider one’s own community as unique and exclusive. Some linguistic communities, by virtue of being closer to the seat of power, assumed the hegemonic role of representing their own literature and culture as the best in the Indian tradition and there was a conscious effort on their part to marginalize other cultures as less developed. Literary histories were constructed in order to obliterate the existence of the earlier robust tradition of interactive cultures. This cultural chauvinism lies at the root of much of the social tension in the country even today, since it has not been weakened in the post-colonial era. The project of exposing the motives behind this tendency to sideline other cultures of the subcontinent by a few dominant voices from one particular culture is a very laudable one. It seeks to take up the cudgels against a dangerous tendency that seeks to retard the growth of a critical judgment, one that can rise above narrow regional considerations. A comparative approach to literary studies holds the possibility of focusing attention on those robust elements in Indian culture which have continued to exist despite the colonial distortions; in fact, these elements reflect the fluidity of all cultures. Such an approach would also expose the inadequacy of a good deal of recent literary studies, which are based on a blinkered vision of literary histories. To cite an example, I would like to refer to an anthology of scholarly articles recently published from Kolkata. The collection of essays is the outcome of a series of conferences held at Kolkata and Italy. It claims to represent the responses of “Indian“ and European scholars to the notion of “Renaissance.“ However, the Indian texts and issues they focus upon are confined to Bengal. The introductory note however mentions casually that in the nineteenth and early twentieth century there were also corresponding movements in other parts of India “adding up to a putative ’Indian’ Renaissance,“ implying that the idea of an intellectual movement similar to the one that took place in Bengal is a mere supposition. The anthology claims to represent the views of Indian as well as European scholars on the European and ’Indian’ Renaissance. But, the only Indian writers whose works have been discussed in the essays are Bankim, Vidyasagar and Tagore, all of whom wrote in Bangla. Does this mean that the study of a few nineteenth-century Bengali texts would be enough to understand the changes taking place in the literatures and societies of all the other regions of India during the latter part of the nineteenth century? Assuming that Indian Renaissance, if there was one, was actually a ’Bengal Renaissance’ (as most scholars from Bengal would like to believe and proclaim), is it credible that the grand narrative of ’Bengal Renaissance’ could have been created in a completely isolated and sanitized space called “colonial Bengal?“ Pages: 1 2 3 4 |
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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 |