I would like to thank Professor John Hawley and Professor Nalini Iyer for inviting me to edit this special issue, Professor Robin Field for her immaculate and generous editorial assistance, all the editorial staff at SAR, the referees who read the essays and made insightful suggestions, and of course to all the contributors for responding to my invitation and their superb essays. I have indeed learned from your work, and I am truly grateful.
So, what was the special topic going to be? I decided to avail of some of the recent vibrant happenings in the field of South Asian Studies. There had just been a significant and well-attended MLA 2017 panel on the future of South Asian Studies, followed by a special issue of SAR (38.3, 2017) based on the MLA panel. I wanted to keep that critical, self-reflexive momentum going, and chose participation anxiety as the theme for the special issue. Why anxiety, whose anxiety: why was I pathologizing something as joyful as participation? Was I generalizing my particular anxiety and projecting it on the field of South Asian Studies at large? Here is an attempt at explanation. What I had in mind was something like this: a series of questions. Who are the South Asian scholars? Where do they come from, and where do they belong? What is the relationship between who they are and what they do? Is this relationship umbilical, natal, filiative, affiliative, representational, post-representational, ontological, epistemological, and methodological? Here, I had in mind the classic tensions between identity politics and the politics of representation: like minds, like bodies, like truths, like methods, like perspectives, and like what? What is the difference between a South Asian and a South Asianist? What about the dominance of India within the South Asian spectrum? Here of course I was thinking of the fraught relationship between the politics of location a la Adrienne Rich and the nuances of subject positionality a la Michel Foucault. There were also concerns about how to parse interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, conjunctural belonging, and loyalty. Were South Asian studies an autonomous and integral field, or the result of an act of bricolage, jugad as they say in Hindi?
My sense of it is that these questions when experienced incrementally produce a generative sense of anxiety. When I contribute to South Asian Studies, who am I and what hat am I wearing? Am I my hat? Am I singing a major raga or a minor raga? Who is listening to me: single or multiple audiences? Am I prioritizing one audience over the other? Am I a postcolonial scholar performing as a South Asianist? What specifically makes my intervention specifically South Asian and not subaltern or diasporic or postmodern or deconstructive or psychoanalytic or Asian American or transnational feminist, and so on? Is there any reason to be anxious about both my placement within South Asian Studies and the placement of South Asian Studies within a larger frame may be the world at large or the MLA? Was South Asia a constituency, a sub-constituency? Most importantly, if a South Asianist is raising issues that are both local and transcendentally general, is her voice being heard at large? Is she being acknowledged as contributing crucially to Theory, Thought, Existence, and Epistemology; or is her indexicality immured within her so-called Area? These questions indeed had been raised trenchantly both at the MLA panel and in the SAR special issue. Comparative anxieties had been articulated: how well is South Asian Studies performing, relative to Caribbean Studies and other so called minority or area studies formations? Are we being gerrymandered toward potential insignificance? Is South Asian Studies pulling its weight in the overall scheme of things? Is South Asian Studies existing and co-existing in equal measure? How should South Asian studies honor and preserve its specificity, be part of a relational field, and not forfeit its prerogative as well as potential to be heard as a major voice and not as a vernacular aside? Are these conflicting and contradictory objectives? Should South Asian studies persist, persist in its present formation, or chose a different avatar?
My suggestion of the topic to the contributors was more gestural than definitive or descriptive. I had no idea what traction the theme would have with the potential contributors. I had no ideal or exemplary template to hold out. To be quite honest, as CFPs go, my call was as lax and nondescript as it could get: I guess my anxiety had to do with “nothing.” My hope was that the contributions chosen, in addition to addressing their subject matter, would also mobilize a meta- dimension of self-reflexivity. The anxiety did not have to be palpably symptomatic nor did it have to be thematized or theorized explicitly: all I was looking for was an openly interrogative mode or register at the very heart of the scholarly commitment. I am happy to say that of the five essays, three address the theme of anxiety explicitly while the other two perform with anxious care in their delineation of their objects of analysis: where they belong, where they are at home, how they and travel discursively, and geopolitically.
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s personally and institutionally inflected essay serves as an eloquent hermeneutic analysis of home and world, of arrivals and departures, and of various trajectories of flight to and from locations that function reversibly both as starting points and as termini. Of particular significance in this essay are the complications of inter-generational recognition and mis-recognition within South Asian Studies. This piece also rehearses critically, from the point of view of its author, how, to avail of Ranajit Guha’s ringing phrase, “the existential tangles with the epistemological” in the lives and itineraries of scholars whose work is intimately braided with who they are, or who they think are or should be. Tracing her rationale via episodes as well as with references to the works and formulations of other South Asian/Postcolonial/Diasporic/Subaltern scholars both of her generation and older, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan offers the reader a phenomenological cartography, or a cartographic phenomenology of how she, Ragini as an individual and scholar both “is,” and “became”: a kind of Gramscian inventory of the many traces that lead up to the present. Given the different generations within the South Asian Diaspora, each with its own starting point, there is indeed no way to legislate or adjudicate and thereby declare one point of entry as more exemplary or paradigmatic than another. All there is to go by is circumstantial contingency, and sometimes serendipity. Making crucial distinctions between earned and given homes, either disciplinary or natal, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan offers her own personal/political/institutional/pedagogical/curricular arc not necessarily as a bildungsroman, but as an act of revealing and symptomatic sharing. English, Postcoloniality, Diaspora Studies, and South Asian Studies are “relationalized” by this essay with rare feeling and integrity. If indeed there is no Home to leave, is leaving still leaving? Are leaving and reaching transitive or intransitive? In raising these questions with an urgency that is both personal and political, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan has in a way double-coded scholarly anxiety as cause and effect, as both pre- and post-erous.
Anandi Rao’s contribution takes the form of an itinerant agenda that embodies and performs an anxiety on behalf of a postcolonial truth that both necessitates and negates the archival imperative that is nameless and indeterminate and historically specific as Colonialist. In a deconstructive move that is simultaneously post-structuralist (Derrida) and post-colonial (Spivak and Arondekar), Anandi Rao’s essay shadows and haunts the figure of Portia across an uneven terrain. The legibility of Portia is made to go through a translational grid where meaning is more a shuttle than a residence, and good old Shakespeare is counter-established as the locus post classicus of the investigation. As a forensic act fueled by genealogical passion, this essay has a double structure built into it: the author’s journey through the archival labyrinth, and her search for Portia, the famous Shakespearean character who morphs into Arya, the only female translator of Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice) in the Colonial archive. Organically built into this essay is the politics of translation that destabilizes the regime of meaning anchored in monolingual sovereignty. The travel as well as the de- and re-territorialization of Shakespeare by way of translations by male civil servants in the Indian Colonial regime raises an important question about the relationship of postcoloniality to the colonialist archive. What indeed is the analytic as well as the hermeneutic salience of an archive that is not one’s own and yet warrants critical attention? How should the postcolonial as a heuristic position itself vis-a-vis the colonialist archive? What happens to the eminent exemplarity of the Shakespeare text as it is submitted to the agency of translation? Is Shakespeare “indigenized” in this encounter, or is the “native” curriculum Occidentalized in the name of the Bard of Avon? In the search of Portia, Arya the female translator emerges as the gendered colored female protagonist who in her secondary role as translator reverses the power dynamic between the original and the translation. Not just that: the history of Arya’s present as female feminizes the horizon of hermeneutic contact. The vital take away from Anandi Rao’s essay is the double-conscious recognition that the archive fever in its postcolonial manifestation of radical untranslatability is a symptom that transgresses the normativity of the archive.
Marian Aguiar’s essay makes a direct connection between anxiety and interdisciplinarity. Critically rehearsing the fraught institutional history of interdisciplinary studies in the USA, by way of Stanley Fish, Gayatri Spivak, Bruce Robbins, Marjorie Garber, Graham Huggan, Ato Quayson, and others, Marian Aguiar reminds the reader that all along interdisciplinarity has performed both as the symptom and the remedy. Initially intended as a generous, inclusive, and egalitarian breaking down of silo structures, and the fiercely guarded boundaries between different domains and knowledges, the actual practice of interdisciplinarity still remains captive to the reality of unequal knowledges and an episteme structured in unevenness. While interdisciplinarity has been successful in reterritorializing knowledge as a continuum, it has also resulted in the deracination of truths and insights from their “native” soil, resulting in a scenario where there are hegemonic and non-hegemonic participants, winners, and losers. In her symptomatic reading of interdisciplinarity, Aguiar points out that often it is not clear if interdisciplinary practice has to do with truth, or perspective, or method; or if it is syncretic. Using examples of interdisciplinary curricula from various Schools and Departments including her own home institution, Carnegie Mellon University, Aguiar gets to the structural and institutional underpinnings of such initiatives. Having provided an overall map of Interdisciplinarity in general, Aguiar’s essay goes on to examine how this model has worked in the instances of Postcolonial and South Asian Studies. Whereas postcolonial interdisciplinarity has been caught up with questions of loyalty to specific epistemological subject positions or the politics of location, such as the Nation, the Diaspora, or Transnationalism, South Asian Studies has to deal with the history of its provenance as Area Studies and the exigencies of the Cold War period. The critical point that Aguiar is making is that interdisciplinary practice has been both in the name of projects that are out there and worldly, and in the name of institutional formations with their relative autonomy. Rather than provide a one-size fit all modular template for analysis, Aguiar employs a comparative framework, USA as well as institutions in India, and argues that transversal movement and mobility are of the essence to the success of interdisciplinary ventures.
Ketu Katrak’s contribution, in interrogating the Indian Nation in the name of Contemporary Dance, raises the crucial issue of temporality, as well as historicity, along multiple axes. Katrak makes a double-pronged case against the dominance of the nation state form. Nation states in general, wherever they are, take the form of an oppressive and majoritarian unification that others temporalities that do not conform to the dictates of national reason. India, as an instance of a post-colonial nation state, inherits this logic and from the very beginning of its independence, and has alienated vast areas and demographic constituencies of its own population, in particular the North East and the state of Manipur in particular. Katrak’s contribution critically invokes the category of esthetic temporality to question and destabilize the myth or the canon of a so-called “representative” national esthetic that falsely presumes to speak for the sensibility of the entire Indian nation. In initiating an antagonistic as well as a contrapuntal encounter between the two categories of “Indian,” and “contemporary,” Katrak achieves a dual purpose: an intra-national differentiation between what is supposedly Indian and what is contemporary, as well as a global or inter-national differentiation between Indian contemporaneity and a Eurocentric cosmopolitan contemporaneity. Drawing on the creative and revolutionary projects of several contemporary dance movements and troupes in India as well as in the Diaspora, Katrak’s essay demonstrates the potential of dance to intervene radically in the politics of race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, language, and ethnicity. Astad Deboo’s insurgent work with his team of Manipuri dancers takes pride of place in Katrak’s analysis. Doing a close reading of Deboo’s dance kinesthetic: choreography, movement, music, rhythm, corporeality, Katrak celebrates and pays rich homage to Deboo as a major global dance-thinker whose work articulates “Indian” with “Contemporary” and the political with the esthetic, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Employing her own location in the Diaspora as well as her expertise in Bharata Natyam, Ketrak opens up a space for sensuous thinking that goes well beyond the punitive poverty of the Hindu Indian Nation State. The anxiety in this essay is national, and the response post-national.
Nasser Mufti in his essay revisits that evergreen, controversial figure V.S. Naipaul and his much debated travelogue narrative, An Area of Darkness, i.e., India. The anxiety in this contribution has to do with the semantics of “fantasy.” Mufti’s essay raises the elusive question: Where does one place Naipaul in the colonial, post-colonial continuum? Is Naipaul’s message best understood as ideological content or as perspective; migrant or national-sovereign, extra-territorially British or diasporically Indian, West Indian? How best is Naipaul held accountable, and how does he create his own palimpsest of accountability? In raising these questions, Nasser Mufti argues that “fantasy” works for Naipaul not as the familiar trope of escapism, wish-fulfillment, projection or introjection, but as the marker of crisis in his understanding of the world as cartography, as a form of recognition of the dissidence of Home and World. In a controversial hermeneutic move that yokes Naipaul with Edward Said’s critical category of the Voyage In, Nasser Mufti makes the case that while the location of Naipaul’s “fantasy’ may well be India, the site of the epistemic resolution of this fantasy is Britain. It is in India that Victorian Britain is made and unmade, and it is in the heart of Britain that Indian reality is fabulated. Colonial India, in having become the locus for the British “fantasy,” initiates a pattern of mimicry as mimesis where Britain is forced to actualize its reality as a fantasy elsewhere. The voyage in for Naipaul is already an arrival in fantasy elsewhere to be transported back to Britain as a specular disorientation. Mufti’s ideological parsing of the figurality of the fantasy work in Naipauls’s Area of Darkness opens up a space of indeterminacy where the fantasy works reversibly between the colonizer and the colonized. It is the ubiquity of fantasy as crisis that results in Naipaul’s feeling of homelessness, wherever he is: Delhi or London. The real location for Naipaul is fantasy as crisis. Fantasy as a category developed within Victorian Colonial England loses and finds itself in its travel between London and Delhi. Mufti’s contribution reminds us that post-colonial mimicry has already been preceded by pre-colonial mimicry, and that fantasy as crisis that problematizes the narratives of historicism and nationalism has a structure that is both figural and representational, historical as well as allegorical.
As I sign off as the editor of this special issue, I feel a particular surge of gratitude to all the contributors who have helped me understand that anxieties are both necessary and contingent, both originary and epiphenomenal, field-specific, and a-contextual; and whether manifest or latent, there can be no creativity without anxiety. Creativity as proactive and anxiety as reactive are but flip sides of the same currency: Indian Rupee or the American Dollar with all the variability of the exchange rate.
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Notes on contributors
R. Radhakrishnan
R. Radhakrishnan is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies at UC Irvine. He is the author of Diasporic Mediations: Theory in an Uneven World; Between Home and Location: The Politics of Cultural Theory; History, the Human, and the World Between; and Edward Said: A Dictionary, and editor of Theory as Variation; Coeditor with Susan Koshy of Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo Diaspora; coeditor with Kilash Baral of Theory After Derrida. His essays have appeared in a wide range of academic journals and edited collections. A published poet in English and Tamizh, he has a volume of poems in Tamizh, and one forthcoming in English. Translator of contemporary Tamizh fiction into English and winner of several awards including the Fulbright, and most recently, the Distinguished Achievement Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the South Asian Literary Association, he is currently working on a book length project on The Open.