South Asian Literature and the World: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue of South Asian Review on South Asian Literature and the World frames the essays in the collection within theories of diaspora, transculturation, and regional neocolonialisms. In thinking through what kind of new relationships are excavated between imagined collectives such as South Asia and the world, this essay argues that South Asian literature and literary criticism has something to say about South-South relationships, reframing the common narrative of the powerful Global North and a disenfranchised Global South. This is not always a comforting reframing since it has to take into account the ways that South Asian nations might take on oppressive roles in regional or intranational ways. This special issue collects essays that take on this excavatory, critical, and generative work of rethinking the relationship of South Asia in the world.

Keywords:

• South Asian literature
• diaspora
• South-South relationships
• transculturation

This special issue was inspired by the 2019 South Asian Literary Association annual meeting that I was fortunate enough to co-chair with Dr. Nalini Iyer. Embedded in the conference theme that year – South Asian Literatures in the World – was also the ghost of its converse, which is to say the world in South Asian literatures. The “world” is of course polysemic, at once referring to, potentially, the publishing world, which may make demands about what textual worlds, or fictive and creative universes generated by individual texts, get narrated. These may in turn determine how the world, that is, a multinational audience, will imagine South Asia.

The conference was able to address the above multivalence of “the world” in relationship to South Asian Literature in a way that only a conference can – through the combination of scholarship, discussions with publishers and editors, panels on professionalization that addressed what it meant to be South Asianists predominantly in departments where such faculty are guaranteed to be in the minority (another word with multiple, applicable meanings in this context), etc. It became increasingly clear that the idea of South Asian literature in the world was of interest to the community of literary critics gathered there, who had come not just to Chicago for the conference but also more generally to South Asian literary studies by negotiating different categories that the world has cast for us, sometimes much before our entry into the field, and that we must nonetheless negotiate, such as identity politics, disinterested scholarship, objectivity, estheticism.

In this, “the world” is therefore best understood as part of Edward Said’s triad of the world, the text, and the critic, three mutually determining rather than merely influencing poles. If, for Said, “Words and texts are so much of the world that their effectiveness, in some cases even their use, are matters having to do with ownership, authority, power, and the imposition of force,” (Said 1983, 48), then it follows that not just criticism, but the very site of the production of criticism – a conference, say – is beholden to the same demands of power and authority. For instance, in 2018, the Indian government denied visas, wholesale, to Pakistani scholars who were hoping to travel to New Delhi for the Association for Asian Studies conference at Ashoka University. This sweeping dismissal was borne out of the Hindutva politics that underlies the Indian central government and is part of the same global anti-Muslim bigotry that prevented scholars from Pakistan and Bangladesh from traveling to our own conference in Chicago, who, like their colleagues months before, were denied travel visas. It is impossible to calculate how much our understanding and knowledge in areas such as Asian studies or South Asian literature has been stunted by the absence of diverse scholarly voices in these sites of ostensible knowledge-production. So, for instance, I have no doubt that the dominance of India in South Asian academic thought, to the absolute detriment of other regional objects and subjects of study and consequently to the field itself, will remain unchallenged if others are not permitted to interrupt or even interoclute.

Given both the discussions that happened at the conference as well as the material contingencies that undergirded it, what emerged from the conference was the need to continue thinking through the possibilities and, perhaps even more importantly, the limits of South Asia as a structuring, epistemological collectivity; such a need has fueled the essays collected in this special issue (which is not a collection of conference proceedings). To the extent that the essays here elaborate on the possibilities of South Asia, they think through global connections beyond just the one between a powerful and wealthy Global North and a disenfranchized Global South (see the essay by Chatterji in this issue). Instead, they turn to a critical world that comprises of South-South affiliations (see Chakour), of more nuanced and heterogeneous global theories derived from local cultural productions (see essays by Roy, Anonymous), of diasporas interacting not just with hostlands but also other immigrant and exiled populations (see Moscovitch), of the investigation of transnational and cosmopolitan cultural interactions that existed before the latter half of the twentieth century (see the essay by Jayagopalan).

The essays are not uncritically celebratory, especially of the framing category of South Asia and its evinced ability to address inequalities where other frameworks, like the nation, have failed. South Asian postcolonial theory has long been skeptical of the emancipatory potential of the nation-state, noting the blindness of the deep horizontal comradeship of these national imagined communities to the profound inequalities and conflicts within and perpetuated by national boundaries – Partha Chatterjee’s The Nation and Its Fragments being perhaps the most well- known of such arguments (Chatterjee 1993). A collective identity such as South Asian seems at first blush to tend to some of these blind spots, allowing for ethnic and transnational communities that belie the arbitrariness of national boundaries. However, left unexamined, South Asia, as an organizational logic for culture, may well compound rather than address the myopia of nation-based structures. Dibyesh Anand has spoken convincingly of India’s colonial and violent practices with its borderland ethnonations (Anand 2012), and the continuing oppression in Kashmir, Assam, and the fate of the Rohingya, all present cautionary correctives, and not new ones, to any unquestioned celebration of South Asian identity. Essays collected in this special issue highlight the friction in these borderlands, notably in the spaces between South Asian countries – in Kashmir (see Hamid’s contribution), for instance, or Northeastern India (Goswami).

If what emerged from the conference was the need to scrutinize the boundaries of South Asia as a category that informs literary criticism adequately, then what has emerged from the collection of essays in this special issue is a similar and related critique of the imagined contours of “the world.” Overwhelmingly, the essays in this collection return to the idea of the porous boundaries between the world and South Asia. Though the authors represent multiple disciplines, theoretical approaches, and objects of study, they collectively argue that the differences between South Asia and the world, which bleeds into other distinctions, such as the self and the other (as noted by R. Radhakrishnan in his essay here) or even the private and the public, are clearly interpenetrating. This is not to say, however, that they are intertwined in some egalitarian dialectics; perhaps the most important lesson from Mary Louise Pratt about contact zones, qua sites of transculturation, is the struggle, intercultural conflict, and sustaining inequality of power that defines them, so that she delineates contact zones as: “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1991, 34).

The point, then, is to conceive of South Asian subjectivities and/in global contingencies as something not, on the one hand, an essentialist enaction of dominance and subservience, nor, on the other, a meeting of materially matched twin protagonists. In trying to recast the narrative, as it were, of South Asian culture taking into account global frameworks from either end of this continuum, the scholars included here attempt to rethink the agency of the various oppressed subjectivities we find in South Asian literature without diminishing the power differentials under which such subjectivities are elaborated.

Fundamental to this task is to carry into this project what postcolonial thinkers have been calling for some decades now, namely decentering the space that Europe, both as the site that produces the hierarchical thinking that positions itself at the zenith as well as the apparatus that enforces this hierarchy, has had in the way that the postcolony imagines itself. These calls to critique this politically and philosophically circumscribed Europe are of course varied, and include, among others, Ngũgı˜'s call to decolonize the mind, or to reverse the relationship between Europe and Africa so that Africa is at the center of and Europe is recast as peripheral to African knowledge (Ngũgı˜ 1986); Dipesh Chakrabarty’s poststructuralist call to provincialize Europe, which urged the creation of a nonhistorical historiography or a way of recounting the past without resorting to the (in Chakrabarty’s perspective) Eurocentric legacies of modern, rational, and secular thinking (Chakrabarty 2000); and Walter Mignolo’s outlining of the decolonial thinking which would unveil the “darker side of modernity” or coloniality – contemporary circumstances will prevent decolonial thinking from replacing coloniality; however, decolonial practices will sit alongside coloniality announcing itself as the more ethical and communal option even as coloniality continues (Mignolo 2011).

Of course, the world is not Europe, and writers like Amitav Ghosh have used their fiction as well as their nonfiction to argue against assumptions that transnational interactions, especially those outside of Europe, are a postwar or even a twentieth century phenomenon. He did this in his early nonfictional text, In An Antique Land (Ghosh 1994), which delighted on pondering the contacts between non-Europeans outside any kind of European framework (Grewal 2007), as well as in his more recent Ibis trilogy. Apparently responding to the criticism of In An Antique Land for romanticizing a precolonial past, in the later novels, Ghosh confronts and works through rather than around issues of asymmetrical material realities generated by colonialism but also through other, attendant, if more local inequalities. Fanqui-town in River of Smoke, for instance, provides a particularly evocative synecdoche for a cosmopolis, housing traders of myriad national and economic interests, where individual, corporate, and national desires coexist but are ultimately shaped by imperial priorities (Ghosh 2011).

So, even though the world is not Europe, we have to continue to contend with how Europe has long shaped the narration of the world; in this special issue’s small attempt to counter this narration, we find our theoretical models in thinkers like Priyamvada Gopal. Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, first, builds on the work of other historians to demonstrate that colonialism exerted force over not only land, resources, culture, and people, but also narratives of resistance to colonialism itself, establishing with such determination the idea that freedom, emancipation, and liberty were Western creations, that this is the dominant and sometimes only way in which anticolonial efforts are framed in public English discourse. Second, undercutting this powerful erasure, she shows that not only is colonialism chronologically coterminous with resistance to it, but also that rather than only English and British disseminating ideas of freedom into the colonies, it has also been that anticolonial activity in the colonies framed and influenced British dissent of empire.

Gopal does not specifically address the term transculturation, or, for that matter, a contact zone, yet there are resonances with Pratt in the way that she argues that to see and make visible intercultural contact between the imperial center and colony is to contend with rather than erase the sustaining imbalances in their power: “Without pretending that the field could ever have been level or the lines of influence simply reciprocal given the constitutive power differential, this book suggests that there was also an anticolonial impact from outside Europe on metropolitan thought” (Gopal 2019, 7). Gopal also does not contend with Chakrabarty, but the opposition between their cosmologies is significant for our purposes here; whereas Chakrabarty cedes the ground of rational, secular, historical thought to Europe, Gopal’s fundamental and articulated assumption is that criticism of oppression and resistance is inherent to all societies. In this, she most closely echoes Satya Mohanty, who has argued that though we may well attribute to our understanding of critique to Kant, and therefore acknowledge its European roots, nonetheless, “No matter how different cultural Others are, they are never so different that they are – as typical members of their culture – incapable of acting purposefully, of evaluating their actions in light of their ideas and previous experiences, and of being ‘rational’ in this minimal way” (Mohanty 1997, 298).

Our effort in this special issue is similarly motivated by the idea of demonstrating what I have referred to as the porous boundaries between categories such as “South Asia” and “the World,” or, in other words, to demonstrate the fallacies of essentialist understandings of either of these descriptors, even as we articulate and critique the unequal power they wield. This is why, while it may seem odd to start off with an essay that seems skeptical of the potential of terrestrially embedded categories such as “South Asian literature” or “world literature” to aptly name and identify the ineffable relationship that parts can have to the whole, or literature to the world, R. Radhakrishnan’s essay “Between the World and Home: Tagore and Goethe” raises crucial questions that can productively frame the other essays. Radhakrishnan posits that Tagore’s works help us to understand that, while power and self-interest cleave the self and other apart, a true commitment to the other would have to move beyond the “zero-sum game of politics.” In connecting the very different conceptions of world that Tagore and Goethe conjure, Radhakrishnan argues that the immanence of individuals, of the self, of a particular category like South Asia constitutes rather than sits in opposition to the transcendence implied by collectives, others, or “the world.”

In his essay “‘Against the Biggest Buccaneering Enterprise in Living History’: Krishna Menon and the Colonial Response to International Crisis,” Brant Moscovitch asks “How […] can we better gauge expressions of empathy and solidarity, particularity when zooming out further to imagine connections and interdependencies within something approaching a larger Global South beyond the regional?” He responds through this essay by commenting on the unifying potential of cosmopolitan relationships to cement and build south-south affinities. In particular, Moscovitch focuses on the work of V. K. Krishna Menon whose involvement in London anticolonial activism, for instance with the India League LSE, fostered a specific kind of internationalism that, for Moscovitch, blended liberal internationalism with socialism. Moscovitch argues that through his connections with Jomo Kenyatta, by helping generate support for Abyssinia, by working for medical aid to China, Menon was able to augment south-south alliances, using the metropolitan and imperial center of London in solidarity efforts. While aware of and addressing the pervasive cultural prejudices that nonetheless prevented some utopian collective within immigrants of the Global South in London, Moscovitch shows how these affiliations and solidarity movements were not just a key feature of the late twentieth century and postcolonial conditions, but were also sewn into the fabric of anticolonial activity.

In the only essay in this collection that focuses on poetry, Wafa Hamid examines the coterminous poetics and politics of Agha Shahid Ali’s work in her essay “Bodies in Translation/Transition: (Re)Writing Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry.” Hamid asks what happens to the question of the negotiation of the private and the public in work whose creation is circumscribed not only by external realities, but specifically by war and crisis. These circumstances are particularly urgent in the case of Ali’s poetry on Kashmir, which confronts the state-sponsored majoritarian violence that has had a chokehold on the region. Hamid’s develops her argument – that Ali uses language as a way to criticize state silences, and that the gaps of incomplete translations house the potential for anti-statist agency – through a combination of intensive textual analysis and extensive theoretical and philosophical sourcing. In and through this fluid methodology, Hamid establishes that complex and shifting poetics like that of Agha Shahid Ali’s reveal rather than obscure the political potential of poetry by embracing non-essentialist identities.

Like Hamid, Uddipana Goswami also attends to the state-sponsored violence in another one of India’s borderland ethnonations – in this case, Assam and Northeast India – and how literature about this area raises concerns about oppression and violence at the level of nation as well as home. In Goswami’s “Home, Away from Home: Violence, Womanhood and Home/land in Jahnavi Baruah’s Fiction,” the correlation of the violence in the public and private spheres complicate the sense of any particular zone as being inherently emancipatory. Concentrating on the fiction of Jahnavi Barua, Goswami utilizes a number of different kinds of documents such as media reports and domestic violence manuals to fill out the context of her analysis of Baruah’s fiction, while simultaneously adding her gendered analysis to extant critical scholarship about Northeast Indian fiction.

Adopting a methodology similar to Goswami, Debjani Banerjee brings together policy documents and fiction in order to investigate the question of the generation and development of the “radicalization” of British Muslims, thinking through the significances of state anxieties and the production of cultural identity by focusing on Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. In addition to registering how the novel represents a familiar alienation of migrants from the full British citizenship, and therefore fills out the humanity of British Muslims that policy documents seek to deliberately erase, Banerjee’s examination of Shamsie’s novel in “From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire” also argues that the novel is inherently a critique of the sociological studies that underpin such documents. Through this vein, Banerjee is able to argue that the Global North engaged in a dialectics of sorts with its marginalized citizens: the very act of exclusionary and divisive policies upheld by the British state constitute rather than respond to the very radicalization they ostensibly seek to curtail.

The polysemy of Salman Rushdie’s novels often yields literary criticism that looks at excavating and unpacking references and allusions. However, the author of “Dastan-e Amir Hamza and Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” argues that Rushdie criticism writ large still has significant interpretive lacunae, especially when it comes to recognizing the nonwestern frameworks and lineages that are embodied in his novels¹. In particular, the author of this essay focuses on the importance of South Asian oral traditions such as the Dastan-e Amir Hamza in Rushdie’s novel, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, not merely as a source for specific icons but also as the model for a storytelling tradition, arguing that to contend with this more structural significance of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza (or, indeed of the dastan format in general) is to fundamentally transform the way that we understand the complexity of Rushdie’s writing, but are also able to read the syncretic, extra-sacred, and multivalent aspects of his writing as inherent to, rather than merely interacting with, the “Eastern” traditions that are visible in his work. This essay, therefore, is an important piece that helps us recast the relationship that even a popular and widely read novelist is able to have with the Global North and its attendant critical apparatuses.

If other essays in this collection, such as Hamid’s, deal with the task of the translator, Souradeep Roy’s essay “Ajitesh Bandopadhyay, Nandikar, and the World: Stating World Literature in Bengali” interrogates the politics of adaptation. Focusing on the work of Ajitesh Bandopadhyay in bringing world literature – English translations of French, German, and Russian plays – into Bengali, Roy’s essay deals very specifically with one of the central concerns of this special issue, namely the stakes, omissions, elisions, and accomplishments of having the global speak to the local. For Roy, Bandopadhyay’s adaptations of these European works for Bengali audiences extend beyond either a Eurocentric emulation, or, on the other hand, a nationalist eschewing of “Western influence.” Roy argues instead that, Bandopadhyay’s work, in engaging specifically with these European forms but, through the rupantor form which deliberately undercuts the authority of the playwright, actively decolonizes these texts.

In Tuli Chatterji’s “Queering the Colonial in Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea”, Shyam Selvadurai addresses same question of a vibrant precolonial past of transcultural interactions, albeit read through architecture, and combines this complicating of transcultural past with another complication – that of the distinction between the queer and the heteronormative. In combining the two in her analysis of Selvadurai’s novel Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, Chatterji thinks through a postcolonial queerness that at once situates itself in the space of the postcolonial, articulated through the desire of Sri Lanka (the gay protagonist) for the West (his diasporic cousin), as well as well as is elaborated through precolonial cultural interactions, ultimately showing that neither opposition is quite comfortably binary.

As I mention above, Amitav Ghosh has made concerted efforts throughout his career to destabilize the idea that transnationalism is a new occurrence, or that migration patterns always center the Global north. In “At the Interface of Colonial Knowing and Unknowing: A Critical Reading of the Golden Camilla in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke,” Jayagopalan elaborates on Ghosh’s method by focusing on his depiction of how Chinese horticulturalists subverted European imperial control over Chinese botany, specifically regarding the rare Chinese tea variety, the Golden Camilla, in his novel River of Smoke. If colonialism operated through the control of knowledge production, so that European rubrics and taxonomy controlled understanding of Non-European spaces, Jayagopalan builds on the idea that the field of horticulture and botany was part of this imperialist knowledge production. In Jayagopalan’s reading, Ghosh depicts the mystery around the Golden Camilla as the consequence of deliberate Chinese acts of conservation-by-hiding, resisting and thwarting colonialist appropriation of knowledge of this flower, rather than of the more typically colonial understanding of the inherent inscrutability of the East. Consequently, Ghosh is able to narrativize a story of Chinese resistance to colonialism.

Also resisting the binaries between the East and West, and staving off attendant essentialist identities, Khaoula Chakour attends to Suneeta Peres da Costa’s 2018 novel Saudade in which, she argues, we see an elaboration of a transcultural identity that “grows […] with the features of mobility, fluidity, and instability.” The question of fluid mobility is not just a metaphor about the way that identity operates; in Chakour’s “Unveiling the Transcultural: The Question of Identity in Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Saudade,” Peres da Costa’s novel embodies Dagino’s understanding of transculturation – a particular detachment of identity from originary cultural influences – by representing the lives of Goan immigrants to pre-independence Angloa who nonetheless uphold colonial values. For Chakour, these South-South relationships, which are not defined by either sympathy or solidarity, nonetheless show that transcultural identity works against foundational, essentialist, and static ideas of identity.

In the very first issue of Diaspora, editor Khachig Tölölyan argued that the apparent transnationalism of diasporic cultural production is often developed in mutual support of, instead of in opposition to, the stasis of nation-states. In literary production, this upholding of the fixed homeland is often generated through nostalgia and, indeed, much literary criticism attendant to diasporic literatures has focused on the simplicity in diasporic fiction of the nostalgia for the homeland. Farzana Akhter, however, recasts this understanding of nostalgia in South Asian diasporic fiction in “Looking Backward to a Distant Land: South Asian Diaspora and Function of Nostalgia in ‘Silver Pavements, Golden Roofs,’ ‘Mrs Sen’s’ and The Inheritance of Loss.” In Akhter’s study, the in the works of South Asian writers conjuring the diaspora such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Kiran Desai, among others, nostalgia functions as a specific and effective critique of the Global North, articulating the desire for and possibility of “equality and empowerment” in migrants’ hostlands, ironically expressing a desire for roots in the new space rather than the old.

Despite the far-reaching and thorough analyses mounted in the essays here, there still remain questions that I hope will inform future studies of a global South Asia. How do issues of caste and other regional hierarchies get refracted in the diaspora? What kind of effects do literatures of interculturally-inspired liberation movements, like the Dalit Panthers, or the Ghadar movement, have internationally? What kind of possibilities exist for thinking through comparative vernacular South Asian literatures? Do we have adequate theoretical-critical models to think about global indigeneities? I look forward to the scholarship that will move forward with what we have begun here.

Notes on Contributor

Madhurima Chakraborty is Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing department at Columbia College Chicago. She co-edited (with Umme Al-wazedi) Postcolonial Urban Outcasts: City Margins in South Asian Literature as well as another special issue of South Asian Review on the Nation and Its Discontents. Her shorter work has also appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Literature/Film Quarterly, and South Asian Review, among others.

Disclosure statement

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

Note

Notes

1 The author of this essay has chosen to remain anonymous because of personal, institutional, and national circumstances. Given the topic of this special issue, it is not lost on me that this author will be unable to claim this publication, and their professional development will be affected accordingly, because of political contingencies.