The poetics and politics of blackness: literature as a site of transnational contestation in Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After and Utpal Dutt’s The Rights of Man

Abstract

This article explores the role of leftist literary texts in forging transnational black solidarity in India against the grain of nationalist discourse in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The first section contextualizes transnational blackness in India by analyzing Chanakya Sen’s The Morning After: A Non-Novel [ (1973), which allows for a critical unpacking of the racial hierarchies of brown over black propagated by Indian postcolonial nationalism. The article goes on to discuss Utpal Dutt’s 1968 Bengali-language play Manusher Adhikare (translated as The Rights of Man, 2009), a theatrical production based on the 1931 Scottsboro trials in Alabama, USA. Dutt’s play fashions a local cultural idiom utilizing indigenous South Asian forms of jatra, or popular theater, to reconceptualize the trial of African American teenagers in Scottsboro in relation to 1960s Black Power movements in the US and Maoist peasant insurgencies in India. Situating these texts by Sen and Dutt within a Marxist milieu complicates standard notions of communism and postcolonialism; the transnational conversations these texts initiate suggest that frameworks of transnational blackness should be extended to incorporate Indian and Asian contexts.

Keywords:

• Chanakya Sen
• Utpal Dutt
• blackness
• India
• communism
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Crystal Bartolovich, Suvir Kaul, Ania Loomba and Sandeep Banerjee who read earlier drafts of this article, and offered many illuminating comments. Thanks are also due to the editors of this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Monica Popescu, Cedric R. Tolliver and Julie F. K. Tolliver, who supported the writing in more ways than I can mention.

Notes

1. “Blackness” in this article is defined as a “color” whose social and political valences include and extend beyond the color of skin and/or Euro-American-centric definitions of race. Complementing theorizations of trans-Atlantic blackness, I argue in this article that transnational blackness also has to be contextualized within the specific history of Afro-Asian solidarity, following the Bandung Conference of 1955. In the Asian context, blackness has a complex history of connotation mediated through indigenous religions, pre-European Indian Ocean trade routes between Africa and Asia, and, lastly, the diffusion of European raciology in Asian anti-colonial nationalisms from the 19th century onwards. For a more elaborate discussion of this topic, see Prashad (2002, 9–19) and Gupta (1991). For a recent discussion of the comparative critique of race beyond eurocentric and transatlantic paradigms, see Loomba (2009).

2. Recent accounts of transnational blackness, following Paul Gilroy (1993), have focused on its specifically literary component in the 20th century. These discussions by Edwards (2003), Goyal (2010) and Baldwin (2002) complement and influence this article’s exploration of the literary imagination of blackness in India. There is a marked absence of scholarship on the role of the literary in shaping the imaginaries of transnational blackness in either the Indian or Asian contexts.

3. In addition to the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955, the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo (1961), the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Belgrade (1961) and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana (1966), the last including Latin American countries, were important landmarks in the development of official Third Worldism. For a detailed discussion of these events, see Prashad (2007, 31–118).

4. I would argue for situating Sen’s novelistic critique of the postcolonial Indian nation state alongside his non-fictional work on the Indian Communist movement. See, for instance, the enthusiastic endorsement by Sen (writing as Sengupta) of the pro-China Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front, which was elected to office in the Indian province of West Bengal in 1967 (Sengupta 1979).

5. Further, Naidu claimed rather brazenly that this was “a land which your ancestors gave to the citizens of the country – citizens by the right of heredity, citizens by the right of tradition”, thus making an ideological and not simply economic case for Indian colonization. See Gregory (1971, 264) for the full text of the speech.

6. It is relevant to note here that M. K. Gandhi’s most important theoretical work was also written around the same time. In Hind Swaraj (1910), Gandhi posited a strong critique of western materialist culture, emphasizing both the spiritual superiority of Indian civilization and calling on Indians to prepare for Swaraj (self-rule) through the processes of purification and “Passive Resistance”. Paralleling the call for a separate space for Indians in South African prisons, strict emphasis was placed in Hind Swaraj on boundary-formation between pure pre-colonial Indian values and the values of foreign civilizations (See Gandhi 1997).

7. The poetry of Namdeo Dhasal, in particular, has been reclaimed in recent scholarly discussion, and translated into English (see Dhasal 2007). For a discussion of the local historical context of Dhasal and the Dalit Panthers, see Rao (2009).

8. As Chatterjee and Bose caution in their introduction to The Rights of Man, “[the categories of] realism and melodrama in postcolonial theatre do not neatly arrive in package(s) [closed off from each other]. [ … ] For a playwright [like Dutt] whose history is shaped by the dislocations of a rising fascism [ … ] but also by an altogether colonially inflected experience of the theatre, melodrama and realism do not oppose each other in stark evolutionary terms” (Chatterjee and Bose 2009, 18).