Review: The Politics of Modern Indian Language Literature by MK Raghavendra
Thisdiscussion of the work of many eminent authors writing in Indian languages aims for a political interpretation of a few seminal texts
A book that undertakes to interpret a variety of literature produced in Indian languages after 1947 with a wide enough sweep to negate Salman Rushdie’s old claim that prose writing in English by Indians in this period was stronger than that produced in the 16 “official languages” of India would normally be a multilingual compendium.
uage Literature: Implicit and Symptomatic Readings by MK Raghavendra aims, instead, for a political interpretation of a few seminal texts. This book then represents the first comprehensive political scrutiny of the concerns and attitudes of Indian language literature after 1947. Its scope encompasses languages of the cultural margins of the nation like Kashmiri and Manipuri, and of minority communities and women too. It also strongly pitches for removing asymmetry in the exposure of specific languages as Indian literature is produced in a wealth of languages. “English language translations would hence be the best way to make Indian literature in various bhashas available to other writers, although only a small proportion of the total literature has been translated into English,” writes Raghavendra.
Rushdie’s contention stirred up a debate that is now rather dated. Arguing that Indian English writers – Rushdie’s anthology began with Jawaharlal Nehru and ended with Kiran Desai – were better than bhasha writers was plain mischief-mongering. The editor of this volume takes up a vast body of Indian writers, breaking them up into five sections. In the first section entitled The Nation and Its Ethnicities, he includes Girish Karnad’s three historical plays (1964– 2019), Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire (1959), T Gopichand’s The Bungler: A Journey through Life (1947), Mohan Rakesh’s short stories and a play (1961– 1973), Mahasweta Devi’s Chotti Munda and His Arrow (1980), MK Binodini Devi’s The Princess and the Political Agent (1976), and Akhtar Mohiuddin’s A Novella and Short Stories (1960– ).
In the second section titled Modernity and Its Effects, he analyses Suresh Joshi’s Short Stories (1957– ), UR Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (1965), Nirmal Verma’s A Rag Called Happiness (1979), OV Vijayan’s The Legends of Khasak (1968), Paul Zacharia’s Bhaskara Pattelar and Other Stories (1983– ), Vilas Sarang’s Fair Tree of the Void: Short Stories (1974-1990), and Vinod Kumar Shukla’s A Window Lived in the Wall (1997).
The third section titled Gender and the Position of Women takes up Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar (1950), Indira Goswami’s Short Stories (1986– ) and Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay’s The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die (2017), while the fourth section titled The Experience of Caste includes Bama’s Karukku (1992), Sharankumar Limbale’s The Dalit Brahmin and Other Stories (1984), Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman (2010), Ashokamitran’s Short Stories (1961– 1996), and Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghasiram Kotwal (1972). Vaikom Muhammad’s Basheer: Two Novellas (1947– 1965), Gopinath Mohanty‘s Hidden Ganga and Other Stories (1950– ) and Jayant Kaikini’s short stories (1986– 2006) form part of the fifth section titled Humanism and Authorial Discourse.
Detailing this thematic arrangement gives the reader a clue to the range of Raghavendra’s discussion and its connections with the present. Take Tughlaq, which Girish Karnad wrote when he was just 26 years old. Ostensibly about the mercurial ruler who was Sultan of Delhi between 1325 and 1351, it was also an allegory of the Nehruvian era, which began with dreams and ended in disillusionment. Of course, the political metaphor can be extended to the current time.
Raghavendra argues that, despite the linguistic divisions, novels in Indian languages in the early 20th century “reinforce” each other. Together, they imagine a unified nation, and the local languages – whether Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada – “do not appeal to identities other than the Indian one”. Whether this “pan- Indian” aspect of bhasha literature, regardless of the language used, is still prevalent after 1947 requires scrutiny. The editor’s purpose is to find “commonalities” – like a socio-political slant, both conscious and unconscious – in the writing, and to “determine the relationship between bhasha writing and national culture” through individual writers. The book does open up the idea of Indian modernity to a vertiginous variety of voices and views.
Perhaps, English has an ambassadorial role to play. Translating a bhasha writer into all the major Indian languages would be a gargantuan, though laudable, task. Until very recently, nothing was ever translated directly among Urdu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, and many other languages despite the communities living cheek by jowl on a crowded continent for centuries. A majority of educated Indians are deprived of the vast literary wealth hidden in the works of, say, Bengali, Tamil, Urdu, Odia, Punjabi, and Kannada literature. The same set of educated Indians have, however, accessed Greek, French and German literature through English translations. All the books discussed in this book have been translated into English.
One might not agree with the political spin that Raghavendra lends to every work under discussion, nor can one always detect the unifying theme of pan-Indian solidarity, but the plurality of voices in the volume offer a complex view of a nation whose realities are often at variance with one another.
Qurratulain Hyder’s “transcreated” version of Aag Ka Darya, River of Fire (1984), that sought to construct a syncretic history for India with a sad ending in 1947, is very different from Tripuraneni Gopichand’s second novel Asamardhuni Jivayatra (The Bungler: A Journey through Life), often regarded as the first psychological exploration in Telugu literature. Nor is it similar to Adhe Adhure (1969), a play by Mohan Rakesh, a pioneer of Hindi literature’s Nai Kahani’(New Story) movement.
Chotti Munda and His Arrow (Chotti Munda Ebong Tar Tir, 1980) by Mahasweta Devi takes up 1900 as the year of the protagonist’s birth. That was also the year tribal leader Birsa Munda, aged 25, died in custody. Birsa Munda’s incorporation into the freedom movement can be viewed as an “appropriation” of tribal reality by national history in the same way that Prince Koireng’s martyrdom as recounted in MK Binodini Devi’s The Princess and the Political Agent (1976) – he died tragically on account of his armed resistance to the British in the Anglo- Manipuri War – is an “appropriation” of Manipuri history (Meitei nationalism?) by Indian nationalism. “Koireng, who is esteemed as an Indian martyr to colonialism, is actually only a Manipuri martyr who had no concern for India,” Raghavendra writes.
The editor also includes the work of Akhtar Mohiuddin, whose writing is difficult to find in English translation. “It would be unforgivable to exclude Kashmiri writing from the book, especially because of Kashmir’s contested status vis- à- vis India,” he states taking up the novella Zuv Ti Zolaan (translated into English as Enmeshed Life) that makes no mention of India and is entirely concerned with Kashmir.
The Politics of Modern Indian Language Literature comes with elaborate notes, a bibliography and an index. Perhaps the high seriousness of its tone is a result of its brevity. This attempt at extreme condensation sometimes interferes with the pleasure of reading. However, the volume, warts and all, does achieve what it set out to do – “awaken readers to good literature often overlooked”.
Prasenjit Chowdhury is an independent writer. He lives in Kolkata.
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