Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia

Abstract

This collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by nine short translations, that redraw the boundaries of literary histories both temporally and spatially. The essays, rooted in the humanities and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. The essays and translations foreground complex and politicised expressions of gender and genre in fictional and non-fictional print materials and thus draw meaningful connections between the vernacular and literature, the everyday and the marginals, and gender and sentiment. Collectively, they expand vernacular literary archives, canons and genealogies, and push us to theorise the nature of writing in South Asia.

Keywords:

• Bengali
• colonial India
• Hindi
• literature
• Marathi
• post-colonial
• sexuality
• Tamil
• translation
• travel writing
• Urdu

The leading modern Indian playwright Girish Karnad, who died on 10 June 2019, wrote in the introduction to a published collection of his plays:

I found myself writing a play. This took me by surprise…. [I] had trained myself to write in English, in preparation for the conquest of the West. But here I was writing a play and in Kannada, too, the language spoken by a few million people in South India, the language of my childhood.¹

Karnad’s words are part of a longer story of literary bilingualism in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. It is open to debate whether Karnad’s self-discovery as someone writing in Kannada rather than in English had an element of nationalist homecoming to it; if so, it certainly was not as pronounced as with some famous nineteenth-century writers. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, for instance, after trying his hand at a considerable amount of English verse and theatre, discovered Bengali as his appropriate medium of literary expression along with Bengal as his homeland—but he still commented upon his works mostly in letters written in English. According to historian Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay wrote more fluently in English than in Bengali, but after writing one novel in the former, opted for the latter.² And in 2019, Hindi author Sara Rai professes that she uses both Hindi and English for producing texts in a division of labour reminding us of Dutt, using Hindi for writing and English for writing about writing: ‘I find myself wondering why I felt the need to write about writing at all; why is it that I choose to do so in English when my fiction is primarily in Hindi?’³ Not all South Asian writers have a choice of language as their medium of expression, and not all of those who do, opt for the vernacular. But for some, like Rai, it is the vernacular that grants them the right kind of immediacy of access to the life-worlds they want to narrate.

Appreciating the emotional centrality—and simultaneous sidelining as ‘merely local’—of the language of one’s childhood and of the vernacular in South Asian literatures, this collection brings together nine essays, accompanied by short translations, which expand the assumptions that have typically framed literary histories, creatively redrawing their boundaries temporally and spatially. These essays explore multiple linkages between forms of print culture, linguistic identities and diverse vernacular literary spaces in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.⁴ The accompanying translations—from Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu—not only round out these scholarly explorations and comparisons, but invite readers to recognise the assiduous, intimate and critical labour of expanding access to the vernacular archive, while also engaging with the challenges—linguistic, cultural and political—of rendering vernacular articulations of gendered experience and embodiment in English.

Literature is a space for aesthetic experimentation and for articulating various forms of self-description. Literary expressions are marked by gender, caste, class, religion, nation and ethnicity, which help in articulating, disciplining and dislocating identities. The meanings, experiences and practices surrounding literary expressions in local, regional and national contexts open up a vernacular world of sentiments that can help us in theorising the very nature of literary writings in South Asian contexts. Inspired in part by the collection of essays edited by Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia, our literary journeys here cover a wide range, ‘including those that slip through official sources’, ‘the popular and unpopular, marginalised and condemned’.⁵

Rooted in the humanities, and informed by interdisciplinary area studies, the collection investigates complex and politicised forms of gendered cultural expressions in vernacular print spheres. The essays draw meaningful connections between colonial and post-colonial vernacular literary genealogies by consulting a wide range of fictional and non-fictional print materials in different genres. Together, the essays address literary sentiments past and present, from colonial histories to contemporary literary expressions. Seeking cross-disciplinary interfaces between historians and literary scholars, the collection assembles research on the narrative vernacular in different regions of India. The collection has grown through extensive conversations and long-term co-operation between a cluster of scholars from the United States of America, Canada, Germany and India. It resulted in various formal events in the past three years around the theme, which included a workshop at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (Germany) in July 2016, a symposium at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL, USA) in October 2017, and a panel at the European Conference of South Asian Studies (Paris, France) in July 2018.⁶

An expansion of the expressive archive necessitates drawing on conceptual resources of other disciplines, methodologies, practices and fields of research. Gayatri Spivak notes that settled ways of dividing up the human sciences need to be thoroughly questioned.⁷ The literatures examined in this volume are linguistically, regionally and methodologically plural, diverse and heterogeneous. Those represented here include works from the Dalit literary sphere, history, journalism and travel writing, memoir, literary criticism and philosophy, linguistic and translation studies and gender(ed) politics that are seen through their vernacular interconnections. The literary languages explored here include Bengali (Harder),⁸ Urdu (Boyk, Majchrowicz),⁹ Hindi (Brueck, Gupta, Merrill, Nijhawan),¹⁰ Tamil (Mani)¹¹ and Marathi (Merrill, Nerlekar).¹² The essays further represent writers coming from many regions, including Bengal (Harder), Bihar (Boyk), Delhi (Brueck), Uttar Pradesh (Majchrowicz, Merrill, Nijhawan), Punjab (Gupta), Tamil Nadu (Mani) and Maharashtra (Merrill, Nerlekar). They also encompass a wide variety of vernacular print genres, including journals and periodicals (Harder, Majchrowicz, Nijhawan), travelogues (Gupta, Harder, Majchrowicz), life narratives and autobiographies (Boyk, Gupta, Merrill), short stories (Brueck, Nijhawan, Mani, Merrill), poetry (Nerlekar, Brueck) and essays (Brueck). They cover many themes including masculinities, femininities, archives, rebellion, freedom, adoption, mobility and literary realism. The papers adopt diverse genres and temporal frames while cohering around the central themes of vernacularity and literary sentiments.

As editors, we are particularly interested in examining literary sentiments to foreground what has often been on the margins of literary histories. While there have been sophisticated studies on the linkages between gender and the vernacular print culture, they have often tended to focus on ‘star’ individuals such as Premchand, Bharatendu Harishchandra, Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay or Chandu Menon, or on major periodicals.¹³ The cultural and social spaces of the print milieu have been largely dominated by upper castes, middle classes, elite literati and men. This collection, however, wishes to also study the margins and minor writings, literally and metaphorically, by focusing on lesser known individuals, genres and formats, all of which nonetheless have had an extensive reach, leaving their imprints on vernacular languages and literature, and have been important in shaping modern mentalities. Drawing from a recent work, our literary representations from the margins ‘conceive of the resistance to marginalising praxes as being correspondingly grounded in a set of diurnal and quotidian practices’.¹⁴ Many of the papers discuss particular works and writers that have never before been the subject of intensive study or research: Gupta studies the little known vernacular travel writings of Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), who was one of the first to systematically write travelogues in Hindi in the early twentieth century; Majchrowicz archives the ‘invisible’ and forgotten Urdu travel writing by Muslim women; Nerlekar studies the under-acknowledged Marathi poet, R.K. Joshi (1936–2008); and Boyk looks at the author Badr al-Hasan, whose tazkira, a biographical compendium, highlighted the tension between tradition and modernity. In foregrounding vernacular literature and writers from the margins as generative sites for theorising diverse identities, the collection proposes a radical heterogeneity within the field of literary studies and attempts to resist dominant epistemologies. Exercises of power often code representations of the margins, stabilising and naturalising hierarchies. At the same time, democratisation of print has enabled subordinate castes, women and Muslims to express their opinions, beliefs and ideas, and they have provided a rich corpus of writings in the vernacular. A flourishing Dalit print culture traces its roots particularly from the late colonial period, growing alongside increasing access to expanding technologies of print and circulation. Literary vernacular representations can sometimes contradict or elide prescribed norms, opening up new spaces of articulation. Several of the essays here underline many vernacular writers’ simultaneous reiteration and subversion of normative modes of literary expression, or reinstatement and dislodging of established linguistic practices.

Moreover, analysing and translating vernacular literature from the margins not only aligns with subaltern and subordinated discourses, but also allows an expansion of archival arenas. Feminist historians have particularly problematised the use of conventional archives by scholars, pointing to its dangers and limitations. They have made a strong case for expanding our archival arenas, for including material not conventionally regarded as archival, and for deploying the vernacular as a constitutive source.¹⁵ Perhaps because the vernacular has often not been regarded as ‘serious’ or ‘authentic’, with mainstream historians tending to neglect it as a viable archival source, just as they do fiction literature,¹⁶ the essays here underscore how vernacular literature provides us with layered gendered readings. With its wide variety and coverage, the vernacular offers not just a counter-record, but helps us remake and demolish dominant archival and literary perceptions, and make room for a more robust gendered literary history of colonial and post-colonial South Asia.

Apart from marginality, another central thread running through the essays in this collection concerns the cultural and literary production of gender as an analytical category in the vernacular world of South Asia, as we consider voices of, and about, women and men. Questions concerning gender—women and men as individuals and in groups, intersecting with community, caste and religious identity—have occupied scholars of South Asian feminism, gender studies, history, literature and cultural studies, among other disciplines. Gender plays a central role in terms of representation because gender has a ‘constitutive rather than merely thematic importance’.¹⁷ Social elevation markers of traditional and modern, moral and material, are often gendered. Further, as Rekha argues, gendered literary spaces and women’s writing are ‘a major stakeholder in Indian imaginative capital’ which has ‘altered and expanded the frontiers of the literary canon’.¹⁸ As vernacular print became more widespread, coinciding with social reformist endeavours, anti-caste movements and nationalism, there was an increasing sculpting and articulation of gender concerns in a host of forms and genres, visible in the growing number of women’s writings, didactic manuals, cookery books, periodicals, tracts, novels, stories and plays around women protagonists operating in a modern world.¹⁹ Constructions of ideal wives and mothers wrestled with powerful portrayals of dynamic women who questioned patriarchies and domestic hierarchies, thus exposing the contradictory impulses and tensions at the heart of the domestic–national project.

Literary articulations of gendered notions and experiences are foregrounded in the essays here, as they encompass middle-class women’s writings (Harder, Majchrowicz) and those by Dalit women (Brueck, Merrill). For example, looking through a Dalit feminist lens, Brueck explores the gendered valences of critical debates that shape the contemporary Dalit literary sphere that cuts across languages by paying special attention to the writings of Dalit feminist writers Anita Bharti (Hindi) and Meena Kandasamy (English). To complicate the picture, through a study of women’s travel writings published in some of the leading Bengali journals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Harder questions the dominant perception that Bengali women were confined to the domestic quarters within the home. Simultaneously, he emphasises that the travelogues written by women signalled gendered emancipation on the one hand, and, on the other, helped in consolidating class elitism and solidarity. Majchrowicz identifies the methodological cracks and the alternative networks of women’s travel writing, which have often led to its academic neglect. Some essays in the collection offer gendered readings of texts written by men (Mani), and also deploy men and masculinity as a critical trope of social identity (Gupta, Nijhawan). The relationship between the literary vernacular and the masculine gender explored in these essays buttresses the scholarship on the subject in South Asia.²⁰ For example, Gupta shows how the body of an exemplary Hindu masculine self helped carve the nation in the Hindi travelogues of Parivrajak. The encounters between vernacular literatures and gender dislocate universalist assumptions and help us in reconceptualising both gender and literature across multiple spatial co-ordinates. Moreover, the common quest for the complex interlinkages between English and vernacular discourses on gender is glossed repeatedly as ‘intersectionality’. This term, however, proves valid to address interdependencies between separate generic, literary and linguistic spheres.

All the essays in the collection foreground print as a critical tool, exploring imaginative literary and visual possibilities within the structures and languages of print. They further underline the reception and consumption of literary production in social and private–public spheres. Explorations into print and literary cultures reveal gendered forms of caste and class domination. The essays are embedded in historical and cultural contexts, while also acknowledging the impediments and benefits of larger analytical categories such as those of print, politics and patriarchy. Offering detailed readings of literary texts, many of the essays here draw from the great upsurge of production in the vernacular print world from the late nineteenth century.²¹ Vernacular materials sometimes received colonial patronage,²² but were as often created and to a degree distributed beyond the grasp of the colonial state, creating their own social and cultural world. In spite of wavering colonial support and censorship, vernacular publications thrived in colonial India and were sustained by market forces.

The growth of printed matter as a commodity was enhanced by the development of public institutions, libraries, publishing houses and presses on the one hand, and the growth of the middle class and urbanisation on the other, which facilitated the rise of multiple and distinct vernacular publics in different regions. Print opened up a whole new world of vernacular literary pursuits, whereby various regional writers utilised it in novel and innovative ways. It allowed reading alone and in private. It was the vernaculars, rather than English, that significantly contributed to expanding and commercialising the print market and making the written word virtually ubiquitous and relatively inexpensive. Vernacular print quickly marginalised Sanskrit and Persian because it paved the way for both the standardisation and democratisation of languages. There was an explosion of vernacular periodicals, newspapers, tracts, fiction, travel accounts and autobiographies from the late nineteenth century. The prose form particularly gained importance and took up discussions on familial and intimate matters.

Vernacular print culture had contradictory implications for gender as it revealed a complex mix of anxieties over social status, claims to upward mobility, assertions of masculinity and patriarchal control, politicisation of caste identities and a defence of community honour. Most essays in this collection focus on both fictional prose and non-fiction, which became the dominant form of expression in the vernacular from the early twentieth century. However, Nerlekar focuses on poetry in her essay as she powerfully underscores how the displacements of order on the pages of Marathi poetry in the post-1960s have to be contextualised amidst rebellions in Bombay life, caste and class hierarchies, renewed emphasis on language politics, concepts of the body, and material encounters in literature.

As scholars engaging with the literary vernacular, we cannot ignore that it is also a way of writing about the self, which nonetheless goes beyond the private and the personal to become a way to narrate broader gender and caste identities.²³ Udaya Kumar argues that autobiographies in India are often public utterances rather than just expressions of pre-existing private selves.²⁴ Narratives of the self are embedded in historical relations of power and wider practices of cultural and literary production. Life writing has been a critical genre for those on the margins. Dalits and women have negotiated writing about the self in innovative ways, and some of the essays here explore the genre too. Gupta’s protagonist Parivrajak weaves the self in central ways through his travel writing, marking the nation through the idiom of the biological self.

As a vernacular literary project, the idea and practice of expressing sentiment has also formed a central line of inquiry in our deliberations. The aesthetics of sentiment is often visible in diverse literary genres, including poetry, short stories, travelogues and Dalit writings which are inscribed by the social identities of gender, caste, class and race. P. Gabrielle Foreman shows how Black women’s complex and confrontational literature emerges in their sentimental and simultaneous political and literary production.²⁵ Vernacular literature of colonial and post-colonial South Asia has served as a conduit for mobilising and mediating interconnected sentiments.²⁶ Drawing on an intimate reading public, a reliance on sentiment also makes repetition possible. The sociology and genealogy of literary sentiment allows us to draw connections between rationality and emotionality, affect and ideology, realism and modernism. The essays here underscore how feelings, ideas and emotions, interwoven with physical, national and material concerns, are expressed in overlapping and distinct ways in the literary vernacular. For example, Mani’s essay shows how gendered representations in the Tamil short stories by Chockalingam Vrithachalam ‘Pudumaippittan’ shifted from realism to modernism. Mani’s translation of some of his work also describes the role of emotion in his literary philosophy. Through his poetry, R.K. Joshi marries the practical and the emotional, the outer and the inner, as Nerlekar shows. Situated between realism and modernism as well as rationality and emotionality, the essay by Nijhawan approaches literary sentiment in the specific relationships developed in short stories by Hindi writers of the early twentieth century.

Our telling of the literary sphere in the vernacular necessarily relies on the everyday and the anecdotal as we present the social world of daily life through print. In any case, when one is exploring gendered readings in literature written from the margins, the quotidian becomes imperative methodologically, as it is in the narration of daily life that women and men are ubiquitous. The quotidian ordinariness expressed in many of the essays in this collection sometimes reveals deep structures of inequality and reproduces a hegemonic order, but it also creates possibilities for practices of dissent. Scholars have underlined how the everyday is a multi-accentual concept which is always unfinished and always in a state of becoming.²⁷ We also recognise that references about the marginal are often anecdotal and are rarely sustainable in any official archival form. Capturing a remarkable example of this anecdotal form, Boyk studies an Urdu book of 1,300 pages, Yadgar-e Rozgar (A Memorial of Livelihoods), published in 1931, which recounts the everyday lives of hundreds of ordinary people, including landlords and courtesans, bakers and doctors, lawyers and counterfeiters, all living in the city of Patna.

The essays in this collection hinge on the notion of vernacularity as a central category. Vernacularity functions both as a collective term that assembles the many contemporary languages of the subcontinent under one umbrella and as a marker of subordination to higher linguistic codes. The original meanings of the Latin vernaculus, namely native, homely, vulgar, belonging to slaves, still resonate in the English use of the word vernacular. Vernacularity thus conjures up the existing hierarchy between English and Indian regional languages in colonial and post-colonial times, as well as, of course, the older position of these languages vis-à-vis Sanskrit and Persian. Following Sheldon Pollock’s theory of vernacularisation regarding the rise of regional languages in the second millennium CE that came to partly substitute for cosmopolitan Sanskrit,²⁸ this process received a boost in the colonial era when the burgeoning production of texts in regional languages went to the printing presses, and much energy was invested in the standardisation and modernisation of the vernaculars. The aim of many linguistic nationalisms in that period was arguably to overcome that very status of vernacularity, but given the ever-increasing presence of English on the subcontinent towards the beginning of the twenty-first century, the extent to which they were successful is debatable.

We use the term vernacular in this issue primarily in order to address literary archives beyond English, with their attendant methodological and political implications. Vernacular archives, on the whole, are insufficiently engaged with by historians and social scientists; they have only relatively recently garnered the attention of scholars both in South Asia and beyond. Disciplinary literary studies in the numerous university English departments in South Asia have, not so unexpectedly, often been focused on canonical English literature.²⁹ Philological and literary studies devoted to regional languages, while often commanding significant space in South Asian academic institutions, have been conservative with respect to canon preservation, and apparently hesitant to interrogate the margins. More importantly, scholarship produced in the vernacular is not properly taken into account beyond its respective regions. Thus, South Asian Studies remains largely Anglophone, with attitudes toward the vernaculars oscillating between anecdotal recognition and neglect.

Bhasha archives have recently emerged, however, as critical for humanities and social science research in South Asia. Another central thread of our collection is therefore the question of how to get at the particular choices and constraints of engagements with regional South Asian languages. We are well aware that Dalits have interpreted the acquisition of English as a subversion of power, and that English can be both a means of neo-savarna oppression, deprivation and disempowerment as well as a language of survival, decolonisation and enfranchisement.³⁰ Similarly, the vernacular is malleable because it can equally uphold dominant and normative values and be a vehicle of dissent depending on the contexts and locations of writers and readers. The question of the authenticity of the ‘mother tongue’ is a vexed one, and it seems appropriate to recall what Jacques Derrida wrote about his own:

Yet it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak, so long as speech is possible for me in life and in death; you see, never will this language be mine. And truth to tell, it never was.³¹

Derrida further remarks that language, and implicitly writing, ‘can also be given over, without betrayal, to other inventions of idioms, to other poetics, without end’.³² So belonging to a language is graded, not absolute, and can be measured only in varying degrees of difference from the self. Thus, following recent debates,³³ we attempt to steer clear of essentialisations of the vernacular as the most natural medium of expression and literature, and still adopt vernacularity, despite its etymological burdens, as an emancipatory category. Speaking of vernacular literature in colonial India, Sumit Sarkar points out:

Literature, in Bengali as well as the other vernaculars, contributed significantly to the slow changes in social and emotional mores…. The novelty of novels lay in their locations which were, increasingly, the contemporary world and not the never-never mythological land of Brindaban. They were obliged to end with socially conformist resolutions and messages, but the readers—at least some of them—would have responded to the more audacious and unconventional aspects of the narrative.³⁴

Similarly, through her study of the Punjabi language in late colonial India, Farina Mir underlines the affective relationships and sustained engagement of people with their literary and linguistic traditions that went beyond narrow political and nationalist frames.³⁵ Rashmi Sadana has pointed out the stakes of vernacularity and globality in the politics of the contemporary literary sphere when she states: ‘In literary representation, what is authentic is not merely a question of the literary language being employed by a writer or translator, but a larger question concerning the politics of imagination and whose imaginings become legitimate in which language’.³⁶

Various essays address the use and definitions of the vernacular, its margins and its place in discourses surrounding marginality. Many writings by women and subordinate castes in Hindi, for example, have debunked the use of Sanskritised and chaste Hindi, and have instead resorted to writing it in the ways in which it is spoken. The essays here conceptualise the vernacular as both a way of thinking and as a specific sensibility. The vernacular emerges as a potential arena to align the universal with the local, offering more liminal and fluid spaces for approaches to literary histories. Furthermore, a focus on the vernacular opens up fruitful conversations about comparative work and techniques in the study of South Asian literatures, and offers a theoretical approach across languages of print cultures. After all, individuals, periodicals, fictions and visuals have been illustrative of, contributed to, and have themselves been shaped by debates around the vernacular, the relationship of the vernacular to the national, and the opportunities and consequences of translation. Brueck, for instance, draws intricate connections between a gendered vernacularity and matribhasha (mother tongue) to underscore how a Dalit feminist vantage point provides much more radical and revolutionary meanings to these terms, disrupting their location among the dominant and the male. In terms of both caste and gender, a Dalit feminist mother tongue provides us with a powerful subversive linguistic and cultural tool. Nerlekar highlights the multiplicities that reside in a seemingly singular vernacular, while Merrill opens up a discussion of the nuanced complexities of translating among multiple vernaculars.

Three papers in the collection centre on the gendered content of travel writings in the colonial period in the vernacular. The proliferation of print on the one hand, and the development of better travel communications like railways and steamers on the other, enabled the creation of many travel accounts which were part travelogue and part autobiography. Travel writing slowly became a serious literary vernacular genre, with vivid descriptions of domestic and foreign travels.³⁷ While usually written by men, women too made distinct contributions to the genre, describing their journeys, pilgrimages and visits to natal homes.³⁸ Taking on writings of travelogues in Urdu, Majchrowicz uncovers largely forgotten women’s travel writings in early twentieth-century Urdu literature, a genre that had been almost exclusively thought of as the preserve of male writers in Urdu. In the process, women travellers writing in Urdu were consciously creating a genre of their own, one by and for women, and one that sought to describe the world from a perspective unavailable in accounts by men. Harder takes on Bengali travel writings by women in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, juxtaposing them against the predominating paradigm of female secludedness and immobility in colonial Bengal, and arguing for more recognition of these mostly marginalised texts. Extending gendered meanings of vernacular travel writing, Gupta utilises the Hindi travel writings of Parivrajak to argue that such vernacular sentiments were performative political acts, signifying a colonised nation’s attempts to reclaim a space of freedom, which in this case was forged through the carving of ‘perfect masculinist bodies’ and embodying certain ideals of beauty and pleasure.

A language of protest, non-conformity, utopia and dystopia has often been important in vernacular literature at different moments, especially if it is aligned to the margins. There is, for example, often an identifiable literature of dissidence in Dalit literary spheres, which is even more pronounced in Dalit feminist interventions, as explored by Brueck and Merrill in their respective essays in the collection. It has been remarked that utopias and dystopias are ‘histories of the present’.³⁹ Nerlekar thus argues that the Marathi poets R.K. Joshi and Arun Kolatkar dislodged accepted linguistic and scribal practices in Marathi poetry. Focusing on the theme of adoption as it was fictionalised in the Hindi literature of the late 1920s, Nijhawan argues that non-conformance and non-normativity in Hindi realism dominated such stories because it surpassed the social norms set by caste, class, gender, religion and biology. Mani underlines that in his short stories, Pudumaippittan’s women characters were characterised as being unfettered by conventional gender norms.

Finally, a significant feature of this volume are the short translated pieces that accompany and expand the scholarly articles. They are valuable not only as companion pieces to more fully elaborate the primary vernacular materials discussed in the essays, but, taken together, also offer an important statement about translation as a critically important scholarly production and contribution. They are also a manifestation of our commitment to expanding access to a vastly under-read vernacular archive. We agree with S. Shankar, who argues that ‘translation is indispensable in any extravernacular critical project of renewed attention to the vernacular’.⁴⁰ Translation is a process through which individuals, languages and cultures meet, interact and contend with one another. It is also a fashioning which is uneven and changing over time, and an act of revelation in which cultural context becomes imperative. An emphasis on translation and its methodologies has helped us as editors of this collection to shift our attention away from standardised assumptions of lone authorship towards a more complex engagement with overlapping and intertwined articulations of gender and sentiment in the vernacular. The transference of meaning from one semiotic system to another through translation has shown us how it can be perceived as a tool of control and resistance. By examining the Marathi to Hindi translation of Urmila Pawar’s story, for example, Merrill focuses on translation as a tool for Dalit feminist praxis and activism. In the process, she complicates some of our assumptions about the vernacular and translation. These assumptions have been built into the fabric of post-colonial literary and historical studies which posits colonial-era translation practices as central to the project of imperialism, and consequently as doing ‘violence’ to indigenous narratives and the communities from which they came.⁴¹ Tejaswini Niranjana has argued, for example:

Translation…produces strategies of containment. By employing certain modes of representing the other—which it also thereby brings into being—translations reinforce hegemonic versions of the colonised, helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said calls representations, or objects without history.⁴²

This argument, while not wrong in pointing out the consequences of colonial translation, if taken to its extreme and inevitable conclusion, nevertheless serves to both devalue the scholarly labour of translation and isolate vernacular archives from engagement with the shared discourse of world literature and history. Rashmi Sadana, in her nuanced study of contemporary literary languages and language politics in India, raises the contentious spectre of ‘authenticity’ in the gulf that exists between contemporary Anglophone and regional language writers, and points to an engagement with the aesthetics, ethics and politics of translation as a way to bridge this divide:

What is at stake in [the] divergent notions of the culturally authentic and inauthentic? For one, the ‘realness’ of what is deemed authentically Indian does not lie in the opposition of English and bhasha literatures. Indeed, the question of and quest for authenticity in the literary realm employ and deploy language and cultural authenticity as foils for ideological debates. The process of translation demands a new interpretation and social reckoning not only with a text, but also with an entire field of writers, translators, and publishers, as well as audiences and booksellers.⁴³

The authors in this collection, many of whom are also published English translators of regional language writing, bring this specific experience of reckoning with a text that only translation for another readership can provide to bear on their own analytical scholarship, something the inclusion of translations in this scholarly issue makes clear. The inclusion of translated literature alongside engaged literary criticism remains surprisingly uncommon among scholarly journals, and we commend South Asia for supporting us in this endeavour.

Translation lays bare the methodological labour of the literary scholar; there is no closer way to read than to translate a text. Translation is also a political act, according to S. Shankar: ‘because of its otherness to the transnational and the cosmopolitan, the vernacular asks—indeed demands—translation’.⁴⁴ By including translations in this collection—and by linking the work of literary and historical criticism to the work of translation—we most clearly put into practice our professed commitment to expanding the archive of vernacular literatures. Translations expand critical access to vernacular voices, provide important teaching tools for South Asian literature, history and cultural studies classrooms, and complicate scholarly perspectives on canonised texts. Brueck’s translation of Anita Bharti’s short story, ‘The Thakur's Well, Part Two’ offers a clear illustration of the interventional strategies of the Dalit literary sphere. Not content with the pitiable ending for the untouchable couple in Premchand’s famous short story, ‘The Thakur’s Well’ (‘Thakur Ka Kuan’, 1932), Bharti re-imagines Premchand’s ending to the story and thus directs readers away from a passive politics of compassion and towards an active engagement with Ambedkarite politics, feminist praxis, Dalit community ingenuity, and education’s promise of emancipation from the exploitative conditions of caste-based hierarchies. In her translations of Arun Kolatkar’s poems, Nerlekar highlights the poet’s narrative embodiment of the voices of women both real and mythic, selecting poems written from the perspectives of both Cassandra of Greek legend and a girl named Maimun from Haryana who was raped and murdered for marrying outside her community in 2003. Shriyut Arun’s short story ‘Man’ appeared in the periodical Sudha in 1941, and is translated here by Shobna Nijhawan. In it an aggrieved shopkeeper first abducts, then raises as his own the son of his former employer, challenging notions of the ‘right’ of fatherhood as determined by consanguinity and shared caste and class status. Contributions translated by Hans Harder and Daniel Majchrowicz reinvigorate the voices of early twentieth-century women travellers who recorded their intimate observations on the gendered conditions of travel both within India and abroad in fascinating private diaries and essays published and widely circulated through women’s magazines. Charu Gupta’s translation of a poem and a fragment of prose text by Parivrajak shows how he offered vivid descriptions of America and Europe which filled Indian Hindi readers with the desire to move away from the oppressive mundane everydayness of existence to a world filled with thrills and excitement. His writings combined enjoyment and recreation with betterment of the individual and nation through masculine idioms. David Boyk’s translation of passages from Sayyid Badr al-Hasan’s Urdu tazkira, or biographical compendium, of more than 600 individuals and families from early twentieth-century Patna, offers a fascinating window onto one man’s view of the characters who made up his community, sometimes writing with a kind of journalistic neutrality, sometimes indulging in judgemental gossip. Finally, Preetha Mani’s translation of ‘The Secret of Literature’, written by the famed Tamil writer Pudumaippittan and published in a Tamil literary ‘little magazine’, evokes many of the threads running through the essays in this collection that we have explored here: ‘Literature is the elaboration of the self, the awakening of the self, its blossoming. A writer examines life with all its complexities and problems, subtleties, and twists. These produce an emotion deep within him. Literature is the very thing that governs over that stream of emotion’.

In sum, the conjunctions between vernacular and literature, everyday and margins, gender and sentiment, combined with a comparative framework and enriched by accompanying translations of literary texts, are the vantage points of this collection. It brings together fresh research on vernacular literary archives in South Asian regional languages, combining analysis with documentation through translation. Questioning existing literary canons, the articles foreground aspects of gender or genre, or both, in their explorations of so-far less recognised literary articulations. We hope this collection will contribute to bridging a number of perceived gaps in the field. It is, in the collectivity of the contributions, an exercise of reading across languages enabled by the notion of vernacularity. It also addresses, in its own way, the perceived shortcomings of Post-Colonial Studies to engage substantially with vernacular spheres. And, finally, it is a collective attempt to expand literary canons in order to capture a greater plurality of voices and concerns in the colonial and post-colonial public debates of the subcontinent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Ontario–Baden-Württemberg Faculty Research Exchange Program, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Global and Community Events’ Fund at York University, Toronto, and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University; the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Program in Asian Studies at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.

Notes

1. Girish Karnad, Three Plays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 2–3.

2. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 126, referring to a passage in Bankimchandra’s Krishnacharitra (1886) which was unfortunately unverifiable.

3. Sara Rai, ‘You Will Be the Katherine Mansfield of Hindi’, in Caravan, no. 1 (Jan. 2019), p. 5.

4. For a wonderful overview of the growth of vernacular languages and literatures in different regions of colonial India, see Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times: India, 1880s–1950s (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2014), pp. 326–72.

5. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), p. 21. Also see Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

6. We are grateful to the following groups for their generous financial and logistical support that brought us all together: in Canada, the Ontario–Baden-Württemberg Faculty Research Exchange Program, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Global and Community Events’ Fund at York University, and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC); in Germany, the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University; in the USA, the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Program in Asian Studies at Northwestern University; and last but not least, the European Association for South Asian Studies for granting travel funds to one of our panel contributors.

7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Teaching Literature Today’, in Ruth Vanita (ed.), India and the World: Postcolonialism, Translation and Indian Literature: Essays in Honour of Professor Harish Trivedi (New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2014), pp. 17–34.

8. Hans Harder, ‘Female Mobility and Bengali Women’s Travelogues in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), pp. 5–13. DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1791500.

9. Daniel Boyk, ‘Nationality and Fashionality: Hats, Lawyers, and Other Important Things to Remember’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1792708; and Daniel Majchrowicz, ‘Malika Begum’s Mehfil: The Lost Legacy of Women’s Travel Writing in Urdu’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1790726.

10. Laura Brueck, ‘Mother Tongues—the Disruptive Possibilities of Feminist Vernaculars’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1800231; Charu Gupta, ‘Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India: The Writings of Satyadev “Parivrajak”’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1789314; Christi Merrill, ‘“Justice” in Translation’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1802901; and Shobna Nijhawan, ‘Adoption in Hindi Fiction: Contesting Normative Understandings of Parenting and Parenthood in Late Colonial India’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1804695.

11. Preetha Mani, ‘An Aesthetics of Isolation: How Pudumaippittan Gave Pre-Eminence to the Tamil Short Story’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1799138.

12. Anjali Nerlekar, ‘The LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) of Language: The Materialist Poetry of Arun Kolatkar and R.K. Joshi’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Oct. 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1802680.

13. See, for example, Vasudha Dalmia, ‘Generic Questions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and Women’s Issues’, in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 402–34; Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere (1920–1940): Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Emotion, Identity, and the Female Subject: Tamil Women’s Magazines in Colonial India, 1890–1940’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 14, no. 4 (2003), pp. 59–82; Charu Gupta, ‘Portrayal of Women in Premchand’s Stories: A Critique’, in Social Scientist, Vol. 19, nos. 5–6 (1991), pp. 88–113; Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of a Modern Autobiography (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999); and Sujata Mody, The Making of Modern Hindi: Literary Authority in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

14. Madhurima Chakraborty, ‘Introduction: Whose City?’, in Madhurima Chakraborty and Umme Al-wazedi (eds), Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2017), p. 4.

15. Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Charu Gupta, ‘Writing Sex and Sexuality: Archives of Colonial North India’, in Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter 2011), pp. 12–35; and Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

16. For an overall critique, see Partha Chatterjee, ‘Introduction: History in the Vernacular’, in Raziuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds), History in the Vernacular (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008), pp. 1–24.

17. Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 5. Also see Supriya Chaudhuri and Sajni Mukherji (eds), Literature and Gender (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002).

18. Rekha, Gender, Space and Creative Imagination: The Poetics and Politics of Women’s Writing in India (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015), p. 1.

19. See, for example, Meera Kosambi (ed. and trans.), Women Writing Gender: Marathi Fiction before Independence (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012); and Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha (eds), Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present, Vols. 1–2 (New York: The Feminist Press, 1991–93).

20. See, for example, Ashis Nandy, Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 1–63; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); Radhika Chopra, Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella (eds), South Asian Masculinities: Context of Change, Sites of Continuity (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004); and Radhika Chopra (ed.), Reframing Masculinities: Narrating the Supportive Practices of Men (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006).

21. There have been some significant studies on this. See, for example, Anindita Ghosh (ed.), Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009); and A.R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2012).

22. See, for example, Raja Sivaprasad, Itihas Timirnasak (Lucknow: Nawal Kishore Press, 1888).

23. For example, see David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Malavika Karlekar, Voices from Within: Early Personal Narratives of Bengali Women (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Raj Kumar, Dalit Personal Narratives: Reading Caste, Nation and Identity (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2010).

24. Udaya Kumar, Writing the First Person: Literature, History and Autobiography in Modern Kerala (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2016), pp. 12–23.

25. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

26. See, for example, Rajat Kanta Ray, Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality and Literature in the Indian Awakening (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Geeta Patel, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2005).

27. John Storey, From Popular Culture to Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2014).

28. See, for instance, Sheldon Pollock, ‘India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000–1500’, in Daedalus, Vol. 127, no. 3 (Summer 1998), pp. 41–74. A notable exception to this scheme is Tamil with its much older literature which thrived alongside Sanskrit.

29. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘English Literary Studies, Women’s Studies and Feminism in India’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 43, no. 43 (25 Oct. 2008), pp. 66–71.

30. Alladi Uma, K. Suneetha Rani and D. Murali Manohar, ‘Introduction’, in Alladi Uma, K. Suneetha Rani and D. Murali Manohar (eds), English in the Dalit Context (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2014), pp. 1–9.

31. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, Patrick Mensah (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 2.

32. Ibid., p. 69.

33. For some of these debates in the context of South Asia, see S. Shankar, Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular (Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2012); Kumar, Writing the First Person; and Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’.

34. Sumit Sarkar, Modern Times, p. 309.

35. Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Punjab (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010), pp. 193–4.

36. Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 152.

37. See, for example, Shobhana Bhattacharji (ed.), Travel Writing in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2008); and Simonti Sen, Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives 1870–1910 (Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2005).

38. See Siobhan Lambert-Hurley (ed.), A Princess’s Pilgrimage: Nawab Sikandar Begum’s A Pilgrimage to Mecca (Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2007).

39. Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash, ‘Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time’, in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash (eds), Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 1.

40. Shankar, Flesh and Fish Blood, p. 102.

41. See, in particular, S. Shankar’s discussion of the undervaluing of translation emerging from post-colonial literary studies in his chapter, ‘The Problem of Translation’, in Flesh and Fish Blood, pp. 103–42.

42. Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 3.

43. Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, p. 152.

44. Shankar, Flesh and Fish Blood, p. 102.