Indian Literature and the World: Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere

284 Pages·2017·15.59 MB·English

by  Rossella Ciocca

Indian Literature and the World
RossellaCiocca(cid:129)NeelamSrivastava
Editors
Indian Literature
and the World
Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere
Editors
RossellaCiocca NeelamSrivastava
EnglishandAnglophoneLiteratures SchoolofEnglish
UniversityofNaples‘L’Orientale’ NewcastleUniversity
Naples,Italy NewcastleuponTyne
UnitedKingdom
ISBN978-1-137-54549-7 ISBN978-1-137-54550-3(eBook)
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3
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C
ONTENTS
Introduction:Indian Literatureand the World 1
Rossella Ciocca andNeelamSrivastava
PartI ComparingMultilingual Perspectives
Pre-NationandPost-Colony: 1947in Qurratulain
Hyder’sMy Temples, TooandSalmanRushdie’s
Midnight’s Children 35
RajeswariSunder Rajan
ReadingTogether:Hindi,Urdu, andEnglish VillageNovels 61
Francesca Orsini
Choosing aTongue, Choosinga Form: KamalaDas’s
BilingualAlgorithms 87
UdayaKumar
PartII Enlargingthe World Literary Canon:NewVoices
andTranslation
AMultiple Addressivity:Indian Subaltern Autobiographies
andthe Role ofTranslation 105
NeelamSrivastava
v
vi CONTENTS
The ModernTamil Novel:Changing Identities
andTransformations 135
Lakshmi Holmström
The Voicesof KrishnaSobti inthe Polyphonic Canon
of IndianLiterature 153
Stefania Cavaliere
PartIII GlobalizedIndian PublicSpheres
Resisting SlowViolence:Writing, Activism,
andEnvironmentalism 177
AlessandraMarino
The Novelandthe North-East: IndigenousNarratives
in IndianLiteratures 199
Mara Matta
From Nationto World:Bombay/Mumbai Fictions
andthe Urban PublicSphere 223
Rossella Ciocca
The Individualand the CollectiveinContemporaryIndia:
ManjuKapur’s Homeand Custody 245
MaryamMirza
‘Homeis aPlace You’veNeverBeen to’: AWoman’s Place
in the IndianDiasporic Novel 263
Clelia Clini
Index 283
Introduction: Indian Literature
and the World
Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava
In what follows, we propose a working model of contemporary Indian
literature characterized by four features: firstly, it is multilingual, hence
our volume draws on the specific linguistic expertise of scholars whose
work is included in the collection; secondly, it is translational, so we
consider the process and politics of translation as central to the construc-
tionofapan-Indiancanon(alsothroughthecontributionofcontempor-
ary publishing practices); thirdly, it is comparative, because it is necessary
toconceiveofIndianliteraturesinthepluralwhilearguingfortheimpor-
tance of comparing these literatures with each other as a way forward for
scholarship; fourthly, it is a simultaneously located and internationalist
literature, which we understand as being premised on a multilingual
literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Rather than
attempting to approximate Indian literature to the fashionable centre–
periphery model adopted by critics who have used world-systems theory
to restructure the modern literary field, we look at its enduring
R.Ciocca(*)
EnglishandAnglophoneLiteratures,UniversityofNaples‘L’Orientale’,
Naples,Italy
e-mail:[email protected]
N.Srivastava
SchoolofEnglish,NewcastleUniversity,NewcastleuponTyne,UnitedKingdom
e-mail:[email protected]
©TheAuthor(s)2017 1
R.Ciocca,N.Srivastava(eds.),IndianLiteratureandtheWorld,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_1
2 R.CIOCCAANDN.SRIVASTAVA
engagementwiththepublicsphereandwithpoliticalresistancethrougha
varietyofnarrativeandpoeticformswhichdefyanycategorizationwithin
a singular model of literary modernism and which emanate from the
capitalist centres and are reappropriated by the peripheries (pace WReC,
2015: 14). Engaging inrecent debates about the limitations of postcolo-
nialtheoreticalapproachestoliterature,thiseditedcollectionaimstooffer
a different picture of contemporary Indian writing than what is currently
availabletoday.1
BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL
Thepurviewofpostcolonialstudieshasmainlyfocusedonthecontoursof
writing in English or in the other ex-colonial languages, beginning with
Ashcroft,Griffiths,andTiffin’sseminaldefinitionofthefieldin1989,with
the publication of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
ColonialLiterature(whereitshouldbenotedthatthenoun‘literature’is
very much in the singular). As a result, postcolonial literary studies has
been structured around a vast but still limited corpus of works. The field
has developed in several rich directions since the publication of seminal
texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985), the collection of essays
Europe and Its Others (Barker et al. 1985) which came out of the cele-
bratedeponymous1984conferenceattheUniversityofEssex,andRobert
Young’s White Mythologies (White Mythologies (1990), to name just a few
oftheworksthathavedelineatedthecontoursofthefieldwenowknowas
postcolonialstudies.Whileintersectionsandcross-pollinationsabound,it
isneverthelesshelpfultodistinguishbetweenthevastbodyofpostcolonial
theory that has emerged since the early 1980s, and the research in post-
colonial literatures that has led to the field’s institutionalization within
universityteachingcurriculainEnglishLiteraturedepartments,andwhich
built on older models of Commonwealth or ‘new national’ literatures
coming out of recently decolonized regions. The gesturing of Ashcroft,
Griffiths,andTiffintothemanyregionalvarietiesof‘post-coloniallitera-
ture’ developing in the new nations of the erstwhile British Empire was
followed by the expansion of subfields such as Caribbean literature,
African literature, Pacific/Australian/New Zealand literature, Canadian
literature, and Indian literature (though of course significant scholarship
was being produced on such writing well before the academic institutio-
nalizationofpostcolonialstudies).Animportantdevelopmenthasbeenin
INTRODUCTION:INDIANLITERATUREANDTHEWORLD 3
the area of postcolonial book history and print cultures, which focus
attention on the ‘postcolonial text’ as material production within the
cultural industry and institutions of literary value (see Huggan 2001;
Brouillette2007; Sadana2012).
Particularly in India, the founding idea of a postcolonial literature was
historicallybuiltaroundaprimarilyAnglophonecanonoftexts.2Itmaybe
worth recalling, once again, Salman Rushdie’s blithe pronouncement
regarding a supposed hierarchy between Indian prose writing in English
andin thevernacular languages post-1947:the former,he claimed,
isprovingtobeastrongerandmoreimportantbodyofworkthanmostof
whathasbeenproducedinthe16‘officiallanguages’ofIndia,theso-called
‘vernacularlanguages’[...]‘Indo-Anglianliterature’representsperhapsthe
most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.
(Rushdie1997:x).
This book is our counterargument to Rushdie’s statement. Given India’s
myriadculturalandlinguisticvarieties,itisallthemoreimperativetoopen
up critical approaches to a wider and much more multilingual survey of
contemporary writing from the subcontinent. There is still a sharp divide
betweenthestudyofSouthAsianlanguagesandliteraturesandpostcolo-
nialliterarystudies,andevenmoresobetweentheseandthefieldofworld
literarystudies.Thestudyof‘postcolonialIndianliterature’tendstoimply
a mostly Anglophone focus, because it is mainly situated in English
Literature departments, whence postcolonial studies first originated
(though the term ‘post-colonial’ was initially used as a historical marker
fornationsandregionsthathadundergonethedecolonizationprocess).3
Moreover, what might be called the ‘teaching canon’ of postcolonial
Indian literature rarely includes Indian literature in English translation,
and only considers a small body of texts written in English. Thus post-
colonial literature, especially as shaped by university syllabi and degree
course specifications, has tended to produce a monolingual canon. This
focus has restricted the genre’s usefulness for exploring the multicultural
and polyglot context of literary production in postcolonial South Asia, as
well as fostering a schizophrenic view of Indian literature as divided
between literature in the bhashas (Indian indigenous languages) and lit-
eratureproducedinEnglish.Scholarshavecalledforthedevelopmentofa
differentmodelofscholarshipinordertounderstandhowtoapproachthis
complex field, which has been strangely bisected into Asian languages/
4 R.CIOCCAANDN.SRIVASTAVA
South Asian area studies disciplinary approaches on the one hand, and
postcolonial studies approaches on the other, with little communication
between the two.
Indeed, Neil Lazarus has criticized not only the linguistic scope of
postcolonialreadingcanonsbuttheverysubstanceoftheircriticalagenda,
lamenting the fact that very often ‘the same questions tend to be asked,
the same methods used, the same concepts mobilized’ (2011: 18).
Without wholly espousing this assessment, but instead retaining much of
thepoliticalurgencyandtheoreticalawarenesstheterm‘postcolonial’has
carried with it, we would like nonetheless to enlarge our interpretative
perspective.4 One of our aims is to recuperate a linguistic competence
more strictly conversant with Indian literary production, and which has
historically belonged to area studies, a field that has been perhaps too
hastily dismissed in metropolitan academic circles as constitutively
Orientalist. The aim of refocusing our attention on linguistic expertise is
not meant to exclude English, but to assess its relative importance in the
multilingual spectrumof India.
In short, we are convinced that literature can and should be studied
withcloseattentiontooriginallanguagesandcontexts,andthuswedeem
particularly welcome contributions offered from a wider range of area
expertise and linguistic knowledge, and which combine the urge to con-
textualize, typical of postcolonial approaches, with a more direct field
experienceguaranteed byspecialisms.
THE QUESTION OF MULTILINGUALISM IN INDIA
AsRita Kothari andJudyWakabayashi remark:
Indians moved within a multilingual structure, not necessarily thinking of
theselanguagesasdifferentlanguages,butratherasdifferentregistersofthe
same language, each with a specific task—almost as if languages had their
own caste system and were assigned different jobs. In India, moving from
one language or dialect to another did not seem to constitute an act of
translation, but merely a confirmation of a multilingual world not overtly
consciousofitsownmultilingualism.(2009:12–13).
Indiaisalsooneoftheveryfewplaceswhereyouhavethephenomenonof
writers who produce creative work in two languages: the poet Arun
Kolatkarforexample,whowritesinMarathiandEnglish.Otherexamples