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This paper was presented at the National Conference Interculturalmente, 13 - 14 October, 2006, University of Bolzano/Bozen, Brixen/Bressanone.
1. Literature and/or literatures
When speaking of “Indian literature” in historical terms we face a twofold problem: to define both “Indian” and “literature”. In many sections of Indian society there is an ongoing debate about who or what is Indian: the semantic difficulty of this term can be inferred if one just thinks of the communal riots that happened in Ayodhya (1992), or the massacre in Godhra (2002). Similarly, the debate about what is “real literature” is very active. It is impossible to ignore the so called “dalit literature”1 and “women’s literature”, which are both a growing phenomenon in all Indian languages, and which imply a discussion about recognising this production as “literature” and/or “Literature”.
Therefore it is useful to start by recognising India’s linguistic diversity. The 1991 Census of India recorded 1576 languages, grouped into 114 more general categories of which 24 are recognised by the Constitution of India as “national languages”.2 The Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Literature) – whose magazine in English has the title Indian Literature and since 1954 carries the motto “Indian literature is one though written in many languages” – promotes 22 languages3 on the basis of their literary relevance and has lately also begun considering minority languages.4
Literature in India, meant as literary production, goes as far back as sculpture or painting. However, scientific investigation and the establishment of Indian literature as a theoretic category can be traced back to the 19th century, when August Wilhelm von Schlegel used the expression “Indian Literature” as a synonym for Sanskrit literature.5 Sanskrit hegemony on Indian studies is still strong: scholars in modern South Asian languages and literatures have less prestige in an academic world dominated by Sanskrit scholars, who often have an intellectual attitude not much different from the one which used to be common a couple of centuries ago in Europe. With few exceptions6 most 20th century scholars agree that it is possible to talk about “Indian literature” as the expression of an essentially Indian culture, or as the unity of separate literary formations.7 The search for a unifying power can be historically traced back even into the Progressivist literary movement, whose magazine, established in 1939 in Lucknow, carried the name New Indian Literature.8
The nehruvian slogan “unity in diversity” is literarily reflected in the notion that an essential spirit animating the whole literary production in the subcontinent would derive from national identity, capable of unifying any literary expression. But what’s the relevance of this discourse for us nowadays, when one of the characteristics of postmodern life is the formation of translocal solidarities, a greater inter-boundary mobility, and the shaping of post-national identities?9
On the other hand, conceiving “Indian Literature” as a “common feeling” is a chimera. Of course, myths and legends do exist, as well as the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the narrative modes and topoi that for centuries have unified literary forms in diverse languages, and have circulated greatly in the subcontinent, being a powerful source of inspiration for writers everywhere in India. But let us think of writers like Saadat Husain Manto,10 Mahasweta Devi,11 Gopinath Mohanty,12 Vaikom Muhammed Basheer,13 Laxman Gaikwad,14 Bama,15 VKN,16 U.R. Ananthamurthy,17 or Shashi Tharoor,18 just to mention a few people writing in different languages. If one says that they share a common culture and feeling, this is mere ideology, because each and every one of them lives in a different India. And here comes the issue of representativeness.
Nowadays the resistance against the notion of uniqueness is the result of an uneasiness about the risk of hegemony of one language becoming the sole spokesman of “Indian literature”. This is represented on one side by the most spoken language and literature (Hindi) that in the past decades has often claimed to speak for everybody, thanks to its official status and according to a majority rule. On the other side, though – and paradoxically – a much greater danger comes from English, one of the least spoken languages, having no Indian origin, and claiming that it expresses the only true Indian literature on the basis of its independence from any regional link. Scholars are still confronted with the fight between writers in “regional” languages on one side, and those using one or the other form of Indian English on the other side.19 The point is that the international visibility of writers using English is infinitely larger than the one of writers in any other language. Therefore, “Indian literature” is nowadays often represented almost exclusively by them. Suffice to mention the outrage provoked in India by the publication of an anthology edited by Rushdie on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Independence, which selected 32 writers, only one of which wrote in a language other than English.20
If “Indian literature” has the function to represent India as a nation on the world map (a nation that does not have one language, nor one religion, must at least have one literature!), the question about who represents the nation is not irrelevant. For all these reasons I think that the expression “Indian literature” is better written between quotes. The multiplicity of points of view, of references and of opinions evoked in the single expression “Indian literature” contains (and is constituted by) categories of literature which are extremely mixed, not merely different, but plural. In my opinion no single voice, varied and complex as it may be, can be able to express the many and contradictory inputs that can be found in the many writers of India.
2. Postcoloniality and dislocation
The fact that postcolonial critique established itself in the western academic sphere had a strong impact on spreading the knowledge about Indian writing. Indian authors and themes are represented nowadays as never before in encyclopaedic works like the Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literatures in English21 and the postcolonial writer remains Salman Rushdie. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the postcolonial critic, not to mention others, like Homi Bhabha or Amitav Ghosh. Here again we are moving in an English speaking world. Answering the famous question “Can the subaltern speak?”,22 the rich and ancient literary production in the many Indian languages shows without a doubt that the “subaltern” in a colonial world have always spoken. The question should be asked differently: given that they have been speaking for centuries, how come nobody listens to them? Moreover, as Harish Trivedi asked, “Can the subaltern spivak?”, that is, can they express themselves, theorise, and find interlocutors on an international level in languages other than English?23
In this paper I would like to approach postcolonial India with a focus on Hindi literature. As I said, this is no claim to represent the voice of India, nor to exhaust the discourse on subalternity (I already stressed the ambiguous position of Hindi). Nevertheless, given the large scope of the analysed theme, I think it is better to limit the investigation to my field of research. If by postcolonial we mean the condition of postcolonial India, that is social and cultural changes in the passage from the raj to the first years of independence, and if we want to choose a couple of novels as rival projects to the hegemony of the midnight’s children, I would definitely name Maila anchal [The soiled border] by Phanishvarnath Renu,24 and Rag darbari [Court music] by Shrilal Shukla.25
Maila anchal was published in 1955, and it was immediately recognised as a classic. Set in the imaginary village of Meriganj, it is the choral narration of a small community in a remote village in North-eastern Bihar and of the problems of an apparently unchanging rural life. The setting of the story is the Quit India movement and Independence. Rag darbari was published in 1968 and, notwithstanding its fame as one of the funniest novels in modern Hindi literature due to its picaresque and satiric tone, it is a very realistic and pessimistic representation of postcolonial India, exposing in a very refined way social and political dynamics of rural life in the country in the period immediately following Independence. The novel tells the story of a student, Rangnath, who visits his uncle in the latter’s village, hoping to find an untouched and serene environment where he can prepare for his examinations. This research student in history finds himself amusingly surfing through the venality of rural politics and its connections to urban politics; this leads to a complete reversal of the romanticising of the rural world that had been a peculiarity of Hindi literature in the 1950s. The protagonist’s uncle, both local doctor and Machiavelli, makes an instrumental use of all local social institutions, from the village school to the panchayat [village council], to government and local administrative offices, in order to secure himself hegemony and control over the space he lives in. The naive student, imbued with moral teachings and idealisations, is forced to admit that his whole education is absolutely useless and impracticable, that the rural world is possibly even more corrupt than the urban one, and that it is – literally as well as metaphorically – a “muddy world”. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award 1969, this novel develops, in the form of a comedy, a theme characteristic to Indian writing in all geographical and linguistic areas: a deep gap between government and population and the deriving sense of alienation. For example, one passage describes the “holy war” of a character, “The Cripple”, who spends his whole life trying unsuccessfully to get a copy of a court document without giving any bribe. Actually, the novel ends recording the failure of society and institutions, and pointing out – albeit ironically – as the only possible choice palayan, flight.
Here is one of the basic themes of postcolonial and postmodern discourse: the theme of migration and exile, connected to the question of individual and community identity. I am not going to deal with the renowned definition of postcolonial writers as “translated persons”, nor of Pulitzer winner interpreters of maladies.27 I am just going to give a few examples of the way the theme of migration and dislocation has been dealt with in Hindi literature.
First of all, I would like to emphasise the fact that emigration and the meeting with the “Other” and with modernity are not exclusively connected to the postcolonial period. The Indian subcontinent has seen for a very long time whole communities moving from one side to the other, looking for jobs and social and economic upgrading. Often the groups do not assimilate with the local inhabitants, but they do maintain endogamic customs, they constitute separate groups, and keep distinctive marks of their own culture, even after many generations. Especially the merchant casts have been moving since early times to places where it would be easier to get profitable jobs. Kishore Babu, the protagonist of Alka Saraogi’s Kalikatha: vaya baipas,28 runs through the history of his marwari ancestors, a community originally from the desert in Rajasthan, who moved to Calcutta, the capital of the british raj, where they keep on speaking Hindi after two centuries and make up a separate group.
With the partition of the subcontinent and the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947 one of the most massive migrations in human history took place, resulting in the dislocation of more than 10 million people. The historical event and the trauma that went with it caused many artists in the subcontinent to think over the horror and the suffering provoked by this huge collective uprooting. Rahi Masoom Raza,29 Saadat Hasan Manto, Quratullain Hyder,30 Intizar Husain,31 Yashpal,32 Krishna Sobti,33 Bhisham Sahni,34 Krishna Baldev Vaid, Kamleshwar35 are a few of the writers who combined their personal experiences in an artistic reflection of memories of 1947.36
I’ll deal briefly with a novel by Krishna Baldev Vaid (b. 1927), who, like many others, migrated on a refugee train, leaving his childhood for good back in his native town in Punjab. He admitted that the experience of partition left him with “a certain kind of fear and a permanent feeling of dislocation”.37 Guzra hua zamana38 can be defined as a proustian novel, the investigation on one’s identity. The protagonist is a young man facing the growing tension between opposed communities in his own village. The narrative shows how positions gradually stiffened and the old order collapsed: an order where the divisions of community and religion in everyday life were much more fluid. The notion of identity as a rigid and separated religious or cultural affiliation is rejected by the writer, who on the contrary admits an indefinite nature of these ideas, where the opposites exist together in a plurality of identities. Reduction to singularity is a loss, the loss historically described in the Partition period. In Krishna Baldev Vaid’s works the plural dimensions of modern Indian identity are represented, and the writer combines a deep commitment towards society and culture of India, with a quasi mystic tension towards transcending any definition. An interesting aspect of his works is the description of scenes of poverty, hunger, and misery, which, though omnipresent in the Indian public sphere, seem to remain outside the identity of the observer, as if they were not part of his/her world. In fact, the protagonists of these works are almost always educated people, belonging to the urban middle class.
The representation of the poor, of the mass of migrants who poured from rural to urban areas, particularly from the 1960s, is another important aspect of postcolonial Hindi literature. In fact, they are at times represented as saints, but otherwise they are made invisible, almost non existent. Even in the novels expressing more solidarity and sympathy towards the poor39 a striking note is the sharp separation of classes. Clearly, the ideal dreamt in the 1950s and 1960s had ceased – ideals of a possibility for the nation to be multi-class, multi-communal, based on an idealistic project of austerity and cooperation, justice, and good faith – leaving a cynical nightmare of selfish exploitation. The narrative of the decades following Independence seems to show that the project of national unity is but a dream: reality is a society with great inequality that brings us back to the issue of a definition of one’s national and local identity, in a context of growing urbanisation and mobility.
In India most migrant workers remain inside the national boundaries, and often the displacement is linked to seasonal agricultural jobs, or short term contracts in the urban areas, implying a periodical going back to the village. Almost 60% of migrants move within their district, because mobility among the various Indian states is often delimited by linguistic differences, or else by local policies tending to limit job possibility for migrants, and granting more opportunities to local residents in public employment. Caste and tribal systems sometimes make these population movements even more difficult. Nevertheless, in the 20th century there has been a constant emigration from rural to urban areas.40 Until a few years ago, rural urban migration followed a pattern according to which villagers maintained a deep loyalty to the village they belonged, and families remained linked to their ancestral village even after many generations.41 But due to the geographical vastness, emigrants often have to travel a very long way and they succeed in rejoining their family only at long intervals, a fact creating social and psychological problems. In Bhagvaticharan Varma’s42 short story Khilavan’s hell43 the protagonist is an emigrant going back to his village after unsuccessfully seeking his fortune in the city. His hope of finding consolation in the serenity of family life collapses when faced with the reality of betrayal and hypocrisy: in order to survive, his wife has yielded to the local landlord’s harassment, and his parents, even if they disapprove of this relation, pretend not to know, judging a more comfortable lifestyle more important than honour. Confronted to this merciless epiphany, the man decides to go back to alienation and exploitation in the metropolis. Also Usha Priyamvada’s short story Vapasi44 focuses on a man’s existential difficulties. After spending his whole life far from his family for employment reasons, he goes back home having reached the retirement age, just to find out that love has faded away and his presence is no longer compatible with the family’s lifestyle. In this story as well, the protagonist crushes against reality, which is very different from his lifelong dream, and decides to go back. Alienation, loneliness, and eradication are the migrant’s only companions. Here is how they are expressed in a poem by Rajesh Joshi:45
Sitting on a broken bench in a dhaba47
I sank into my tea and while eating I hardly suppress
memories of home, budding like a thorn in my heart
A vague sadness seizes my face
Suddenly a primary school teacher
intoxicated by local spirits enters staggering
he crashes on the bench, next to me
and mumbles
here in the jungle they sent me
250 miles away from home
in ten years I have submitted hundreds of petitions
I have made thousands of rounds at the Department of Instruction
I have given all my stipends to the national transport buses
I have drunk the water of who knows how many dhabas
I have eaten salt
I have carried on swallowing dust
Nobody listens to me, though
nobody, damn it, listens to my words
Emigration is the greatest pain of our time
How? How can I tell him my pain?
I pretend to look somewhere far away
and I turn my eyes
Suddenly, throwing god knows what insults to god knows who,
the teacher bursts silently
people standing by look at him as if it were a show
how artificial is our pain
as soon as it comes out!
Far away in the sky a curlew cries
returning
to his nest!
Nowadays the scene has changed: rural-urban migration has not been completely absorbed and new large poverty pockets have grown in overcrowded slums. The result is dislocation of labourers and peasants “uprooted” from a marginalized country to urban centres, which is a characteristic of an urban growth having a pace higher than industrialisation; it is a system of underdevelopment which tends to cause more underdevelopment.48
Of course, there is also a strong emigration abroad. Persons of Indian origin have migrated primarily to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Nepal, Myanmar, South Africa, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Fiji, USA, Canada, and UK. A large number of Hindi literary works have protagonists or characters that are Indian emigrants in the West, particularly in connection to the migratory wave in the years following Independence. At first, most immigrants in England coming from the Indian subcontinent were hardly educated persons from rural areas; in the following decades, though, many people belonging to the cultured middle class moved west, representatives of a new generation who had been exposed to higher education and who searched in the West – particularly the UK, Canada, and USA – an alternative to the failure of the dreams of progress of independent India.49 Among the most important novels set in Europe, I would like to mention Andhere band kamre [Dark closed rooms, 1961] by Mohan Rakesh,50 which is at least partially set in London at the beginning of the 1950s. The protagonist of the novel is a very talented young woman, frustrated by her husband, who tries to hinder all her emancipatory moves. The man decides to migrate to England, convincing his wife to follow him, but the couple will have to go back disillusioned to their native country, to live a mediocre life, haunted by the husband’s unemployment and the wife’s collapse of artistic dreams. In this novel an urban middle class is represented which is not typically Indian, but rather belongs to a literary trend that at international level in those years was expressing a feeling of alienation.
I think it is important to point out a peculiarity of exile in the postcolonial context: most South Asian postcolonial writers expressing a feeling of dislocation and exile are not refugees, or people banished from their country, but chose to leave their native country. There are nuances of relevant differences between an exile on one side, and an emigrant, dispossessed, refugee, immigrant, or migrant on the other side. Nevertheless, all these categories somehow overlap: a more or less common factor of the psychological attitude of many people belonging to all these categories is the mood of the exile, characterized by home-sickness, anguish, nausea, a feeling of eradication, the loss of a metaphysic abode. Thus, it is possible to consider everybody possessing this mood an exile, even if they are not exiles in a technical sense. In any case, the impact with the West causes the problem of location and of the definition of one’s identity. From this point of view, exile is a condition caused by alienation; it is a state of disunion, incompleteness, and discordance, generating in the individual an existential state of uncertainty and of anxiety.
One Hindi writer who elaborated this theme with extreme sensibility, intensely Indian as well as universal, is Nirmal Verma.51 The title of this paper is indeed inspired to an anthology of his short stories, translated by Prasenjit Gupta,52 who selected 14 “exile stories”, narratives set outside India that can be read as the narration of an experience of exile, with an existential meaning, from the journey west to the return to India. For example, Ek din ka mehman53 introduces a man, clearly Indian, ensnared between two houses, neither of which is his own. He has come west from India, and he carries in his suitcase all the conventional proofs of his origin (traditional dresses, trinkets, Indian miniatures, and a book with a telling title: Banaras: the eternal city), piled up on the floor to form a sort of miniature India. He visits his wife and daughter, from whom he is separated, in a house whose furniture and objects are at the same time familiar to him, and alien, because they now belong to a house which is not his own. The Indian errant, perpetually travelling between his lost house and the fragments of India that keep on moving with him, at the end of the story becomes an indistinct cut-out, bound to the darkness in a dense silence.
Ve din’s54 protagonist is an Indian student adrift in Prague, a city represented as cold and aloof. The narration lacks superficial events, but somehow something happens underground: the action, in fact, enfolds in the deepest layers of the characters’ consciousness, through symbolic images and associations. Here we are confronted by a type of Indian writing absolutely bared of the comfortable exoticism characterising many postcolonial Indian works in English and made to measure the stereotyped expectations of the western reader. But there is also no hint to a romanticising view of the rural poverty or to India as an original cultural space: it is an “international” writing, the adaptation of existentialism to the characteristics of Indian society.
Through the metaphor of emigration the writer conveys an experience of alienation in an incomprehensible world: characters with cultural alienation are actually suffering from an existential anomy. The theme of the outsider is elevated to a metaphysical level; it becomes the eternal problem of humans confronting the unknown, incessantly and desperately seeking an answer to their questions, to their anxiety and to the anguish of life.
For many Indians the colonial experience was the encounter with a system of thought based on new categories that deeply influenced the development of a new vision of the world. One of the most relevant categories is the notion of the supremacy of reason, which had a strong influence also on the literary production. In art and literature in India there were many aesthetic theories, but accepting colonial mental patterns also implied acquiring an all-encompassing vision, a rationalized one, based on a binary pattern: primitive vs. civilised, rational vs. irrational, underdeveloped vs. developed, etc. These categories were connected to a hierarchy of supremacy and inferiority.
In the second half of the 19th century the process of standardisation of modern Hindi literature began, connected to the emergence of a nationalist movement, which showed that very binary thought: the nation is opposed to the raj. The colonised elaborated a definition of Self utilising the very terms that the raj imposed on them. The keyword becomes “identity”, and the question “Who am I?” becomes relevant like never before. Moreover, in literature new forms are created, aiming to precisely define the form of individual and collective identity. For example, before the 19th century the autobiographic genre was virtually non existent. This does not mean that in India, or in Hindi literature, there was no sense of Self. But this idea of Self was not linked to precise limits of the individual, nor to sharp definitions of collective identity. Now, on the contrary, it was felt necessary to precisely define a new identity; Indian vs. English, Hindu vs. Muslim, etc. The literature produced in this context appropriated a notion of linear progress, and it became a means to promote it, exploring social and political issues. In the literary field, this took the form of separate streams, for example progressivism and experimentalist, and in the consequently rigid cataloguing of artists: Premchand, a progressivist55, Sumitranandan Pant, a “shadowist”,56 and so on.
With Independence, a change happens. In postcolonial literature the problem of nation is apparently solved: the “Other” – meant as the raj or the external enemy – has fled, and the gaze turns inwards, where it finds a plethora of identities, each of which expresses itself also through literature: women’s literature, dalit literature, tribal literature etc. In a certain sense this seems to produce a new series of binary oppositions, where any identity is opposed to an “other”. But, at the same time, postmodernist notions establish themselves, negating universal truth and linear progress, accepting the limits of reason and discovering the fragment. In this context anything and its “other” do not necessarily have to be in a relation of superiority and inferiority. This concept is very similar to the ancient Indian notion of multiple truths, which is now enriched by a new consciousness in a new context. Today, the world is said to be globalized and, even if Hindi literature is little known on an international level and somehow remains linked to obsolete patterns, it, too, participates in an exchange and hybridisation of models, ideas and languages that are typical of the world we live in. A writer like Geetanjali Shree,57 living halfway between India and Europe, is an example of the fact that one does not necessarily have to use the English language in order to do postcolonial postmodern writing. Nor it is necessary for the writer to travel physically: an artist like Vinod Kumar Shukla58 has spent almost all his life in a small town in central India, situated in a marginal and poor area, living an absolutely common life as a professor. Nevertheless, the literature he has created is no doubt extraordinary, and it has nothing provincial or limited, but rather it expresses a rich and postmodern experience, in the best sense of the word.
From far away one has to look at one's own home
from such a distance one cannot return to one's own home
in the full hope of being able to one day return
across the seven seas one has to go.
While leaving one has to look back
to one's own country from the other country
to one's own earth from space
the memory of what children are doing at home
will be the memory of what children are doing on earth
the worry about there being food and water at home
will be the worry about there being food and water on earth
a hungry person on earth
will be like a hungry person at home
and going towards the earth
will be like going back home.
the home budget is such a mess
that I walk away for a while and when I go back home
it is like going back to earth59
4. In closing... or rather in opening up?
In conclusion, I would like to pose some questions I deem relevant, because they are not only referring to the literary production of South Asian origin, but also to other “small” literatures – like Icelandic, Yiddish or Portuguese literature – that produced Nobel prize winners, but still remain in the background of the international publishing world. Can it possibly be that works written in an indigenous Indian language, apart from their higher or lower technical or artistic perfection, do conquer an audience among readers who do not know that particular Indian language they were written in, and come to be part of what has been called the “world republic of literatures”? 60 Given that nowadays we have a “global” language like English, should we conclude that writing in an indigenous language, such as an Indian vernacular, is a symptom of intellectual narrowness, greatly reducing the possibility for a work written in that language to reach a certain degree of quality? Shouldn’t the political value of writing in a “subaltern” language be taken into a greater account? Is it possible that a work written in a “regional” South Asian language, like Punjabi or Malayalam, be recognised as having the dignity of a classic only within a limited and restricted cultural or geographical area?
In order to answer these questions it is first of all necessary that in the critical sphere a debate were created about the recognition of canonical status for some particular authors or literary works. Very few “modern” Indian languages receive attention of non specialised audiences, in European languages, mainly because translations are few or are of low quality, being often indirectly translated. For example, among the writers mentioned in this paper, few are available to the Italian reader, and often translations are not very good, or else they are meant for academic circles, being scarcely affordable to a general reader. Moreover, also the inadequacy of critical studies has to be taken into account. The lack of a detailed textual and literary analysis of Indian works in indigenous languages in their original version does not justify their exclusion from the canon of contemporary relevant and valid works. Most critics who are not experts in Indian languages and literatures, apart from maybe the English, accept the assumptions that the literary production from India in indigenous languages is little competitive on a global level because it is more difficult for those works to reach an international audience and also because they are of lower quality if compared to the corresponding English productions. I hope that both the critical study and the direct translation in Western languages will become more frequent and profound: I am sure that this will contribute to demonstrate how unfounded these assumptions are.
Urban population Percentage of urban Decennial growth rate
(million) population on total (percentage)
population
1901 29.9 10.8 -
1911 25.9 10.3 0.4
1921 28.1 11.2 18.3
1931 33.5 12.0 19.1
1941 44.2 13.9 32.0
1951 62.4 17.3 41.4
1961 78.9 18.0 26.4
1971 109.1 19.9 38.2
1981 159.5 23.3 46.1
1991 217.6 25.7 36.4
2001 306.9 30.5 41.0
Source: Ministry of Urban Affairs
41 See for instance Ravi Srivastava and S.K. Sasikumar, An overview of migration in India, its impacts and key issues, paper presented to the Regional Conference on Migration, Development and Pro-Poor Policy Choices in Asia, Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit, Bangladesh and Department for International Development, UK, 22–24 June 2003, Dhaka, Bangladesh: www.livelihoods.org (last seen 3/10/2006).