The Vernacular: An Introduction

The vernacular is today the site of resurgent interest. It is a name under which to gather overlooked archives in overlooked languages, a specialized tool of reading, a succinct term of approbation, a notion that incites exasperation, and often enough the object of polemic. Accordingly, the critical provocations by four distinguished scholars gathered in this forum sketches a variety of positions on the vernacular, ranging from the invested (Charu Gupta) to the skeptical (Nirmal Selvamony). In between are an essay that traces the contradictory history of the vernacular in South Asia (Bishnupriya Ghosh) and another that recognizes the appeal of the vernacular but suggests alternatives (Francesca Orsini). Despite their variety, however, all the essays reveal a dyadic understanding of the vernacular – the vernacular as one term where the other member of the pair is the standard, the superordinate, the expansive/cosmopolitan or indeed a combination of all of these.

As one member of a dyad the vernacular shares cognate space with the following terms in contemporary critical discourse: the folk, the indigenous, the local, the regional. It is not synonymous with these terms. Indeed, in important regards the vernacular and these terms are rivals in striving to name and elucidate cultural phenomena. There are real stakes in this rivalry (as this forum amply shows) but to pay attention only to rivalry is to miss the ways these terms are also allied. Indeed, one might say their rivalry is itself an outcome of their shared purpose. To come directly to my point: the vernacular and its rival terms is each, I would argue, often (not always and not inevitably) the conduit for a critical yearning for that which lies beyond (below, above, alongside?) the brilliant but also brittle allure of the global. If the global dazzles the critical eye only to, all too often, bring forth vapidity, the vernacular is one point of vantage from which to counter the glare of the global.

I might illustrate my point by regarding the vernacular in relationship to the indigenous. As I have written elsewhere, the one term cannot do the critical work of the other (Shankar 2012, 24). Nevertheless, the contemporary resurgence of interest in both terms represents, I would suggest, a shared discontent with the unqualified exorbitation of the global in all its guises and modes, prescriptive as well as descriptive. The same may be said of the folk, the local and the regional in relation to the vernacular. As I understand it, the vernacular is one more instrument in the toolbox of critical theory. Its greatest potency and potential is when it’s understood as such.

The vernacular is not specific either to South Asia or to literature, traditionally the two main areas of concern for South Asian Review. Understood as a tool of cultural critique, the term is capable of deployment in any context as a particular kind of challenge to the normative (as shown by Henry Louis Gates’ recourse to the term in the context of African American literature long before the current resurgence); see, for example, Gates 1988. The vernacular has been most powerfully applied to the literary because of the tenacity – to the point of seeming natural – of the term’s association with language. Strictly speaking, though, there is nothing in its usage that should make us regard vernacular as a naturally linguistic term.

Recently within the context of South Asia, the vernacular as a critical term has enabled a burgeoning attention to caste. It would be wrong to posit a natural association between the vernacular and caste, any more than between the vernacular and language. Rather, the reasons why caste has loomed ever larger as the critical engagement with the vernacular has deepened (or is it the other way around?) are historical. The archive of caste is not uniquely vernacular but it is differently and more prodigiously articulated in the vernacular. Dalit voices are not to be found only in the vernacular but they are to be found differently, and more loudly, in the vernacular. In other words, the critical difference fostered by the vernacular – the fresh conceptual ground opened up by it – at its best enables a decentering of Anglophone canons and associated sensibilities and preconceptions, including around caste.

Not just bhasha (a term that has been deployed in South Asia to express the politics of languages other than English), the vernacular has been, certainly for me in my critical as well as creative work but also I think for others, a goad to a certain kind of descriptive fidelity (fidelity of representation and accounting) in the field of culture in general. Thus, the vernacular can be a potent critical tool; but this recognition is meaningful only in conjunction with an understanding of the limits of the vernacular as a term – an understanding, for example, where the vernacular ends and the indigenous begins (and vice versa). What is true for the goose, aka the global, is surely just as true for the gander. Taken together, the essays in this forum illustrate the possibilities as well as limits of the vernacular.

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Notes on contributors

S. Shankar

S. Shankar is a Professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. A literary critic, novelist, and translator his publications include Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text (2001), Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular (2012), A Map of Where I Live (1997), No End to the Journey, and Ghost in the Tamarind (2017).