Review of Kulkarni’s World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India | Dilip Menon

BOOK REVIEW

World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890

by Kedar Arun Kulkarni

Bloomsbury India, Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd,
2022
249 pp.
ISBN 978-93-5435669-8

Reviewed by Dilip Menon (University of Witwatersrand)

A generation ago, Ganesh Devy, when commencing his degree in literature, was recommended the standard works in English literary criticism as a prior education. This led him to reflect on the fact that colonialism had generated an ignorance about the rich traditions of classical and vernacular reflection in South Asia on literature and conclude that the subcontinent lived “after amnesia.” Most theorists have been comfortable with this occlusion, and like so many sunflowers, have fixed their gaze westward while leaping nimbly from Bengal to Badiou, or Lucknow to Levinas. Postcolonial theorists have been particularly guilty in that while putatively turning to South Asian texts, they have concentrated on the novel in English at the expense of the vast treasure of theater and poetry in the vernacular. This led the literary critic Aamir Mufti to remark acerbically, Forget English!, irritated by simple formulations of Third World literature as national allegory that allowed a sustained lethargy toward an engagement with South Asian languages and the landscape of multilingualism. Kedar Kulkarni, in his incisive and scholarly book, takes up Marathi poetry and drama in the period of colonial transition in western India and makes a strong case for engaging with the vernacular as much as with literary forms other than the novel—a late nineteenth-century entrant. He also raises the plangent question of thinking “world literature” from the colonies and from the vernacular, contesting the easy assumption that European particularism is transparently universal, hiding the fact that ideas of universalism were a product of colonial expansion and violence. Theory from elsewhere came to inhabit an ecology of interpretation in vernacular spaces and was necessarily in conversation with an existing landscape of ideas of aesthetics and form.

Kulkarni reminds us that the very idea of a world literature arose through late eighteenth-century German engagement with William Jones’s translation of Kalidasa’s play Sakuntala, Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and the gift of theory from the tropics. The history of an engagement with Sanskrit and its grammar underlay later theoretical forays like that of Ferdinand de Saussure and William Dwight Whitney in linguistics, though the traces of this inheritance were effaced. In South Asia, the period between 1790 and 1830 was one of “epochal transition,” as Romanticism and the idea of literature as rooted in tradition, text, and “graphic literacy” were deployed by vernacular intellectuals to move away from the oral traditions of devotional song and poetry toward texts and definitive anthologies (pp. 29, 4). This streamlining meant a move away from a “literary commons to literary canons” (the title of chapter 2), to use Kulkarni’s felicitous phrase. The creation of a canon also meant a move away from the rich traditions of the vernacular to a reengagement with the Sanskrit textual inheritance; from the vanmay (the spoken) to the idea of sahitya (the textual lineage). While there were undoubtedly the echoes of a Romantic, Herderian engagement with tradition, the influence was arguably one of bricolage—a putting together of ideas circulating in the English public sphere, textbooks that reproduced Romantic English poetry, and so on. Kulkarni tries to make a case that native intellectuals were “actually well-read” and that intellectuals like V. S. Chiplunkar “drew upon Herder” (p. 30) and that there was an “echo of Burkean Kantian language” in some of the theorizations (p. 60). At the same time, he also makes a case for Chiplunkar deriving ideas from standard works of Sanskrit poetics like the Kavyaprakasa dating back to the eleventh century CE. The case for European resonances is not aided by the fact of some tendentious translations of vernacular concepts like sundara and bhavya as Beautiful and Sublime (it would take a leap of some dexterity to move from rasa theory to the idea of the sublime).

The core of the book makes a strong case for an emerging ecology (drawing upon Alexander Beecroft) of Marathi literature and drama through the works of Chiplunkar and the dramatists Vishnu Amrit Bhave and Balwant Pandurang Kirloskar.[1] There is a textualization of aesthetic forms moving away from the Marathi poets and singers (the sahirs), the creation of a canon through edited anthologies, and the attempt to produce “critical readers” (p. 85) and secular reading practices while at the same time retaining the performative through theater rather than the landscape of popular song and minstrels. The dramas produced draw upon the classical tradition for their plots—the Ramayana and the Mahabharata—and episodes like the story of Shakuntala, the killing of Ravana’s son Meghnad, and the abduction of Subhadra by the archer-hero Arjuna. Kulkarni makes some insightful arguments about the presentation of the lovelorn king Dushyanta, pining for Shakuntala, and the eager Arjun lusting after Subhadra. The incontinent masculinity displayed by these characters also reflects the degradation of the heroic under colonialism, where the playwrights and theater companies are dependent on the small, precariously positioned princely states or the tender mercies of colonial officials for patronage. The classical stories are recast for theater and at times there are echoes of earlier poetic forms, as with Kirloskar carrying on in his play Ram Joshi’s povada (ballad) rendering of the story of Subhadra, which gives her more of a voice. Kulkarni’s close textual readings are thoughtful, textured, and nuanced, resisting teleologies of transition.

The book ends with a fascinating but tantalizingly brief chapter on farce, deriving from an earlier tradition of prahasanas (farces) from Sanskrit: one on women’s engagement with temple rituals inspired more by lasciviousness toward performers than by devotion; another on the chaos of steamboat travel, where castes are forced to jostle with one another; and a third on the very nature of theater and songs themselves. While this chapter suggests that there are many divergent forms of literary modernity, one wishes that a more substantial argument had been made about the nature of farce and its relation to the anxieties of modernity and unsettled hierarchies. While there are references to the work of the avarna (“without caste,” a term preferable to “lower” caste) reformer Jotirao Phule’s incendiary povadas on caste, the focus in the book is on Brahmin intellectuals. What if Kulkarni had taken on board Phule’s play Trutiya Ratna (The Third Jewel), an exposition of Brahmin chicanery, in which satire is turned on the illegitimate authority of the upper-caste elite? In Phule’s case, as Rosalind O’Hanlon and others have shown, his reading of Thomas Paine and others is directed at a rethinking of society and the forms of representation in an immediate manner. The turn to the vernacular inaugurated in Kulkarni’s book—what he terms as the transformation from a “panchoric to a vernacular ecology” (p. 15)—would have benefited much by an engagement with the ruptures and aporia within the very idea of the vernacular ecology itself. We might need to pluralize the idea of idea of a vernacular ecology and see it as the site of contestation and struggle, and thus take the idea of caste hierarchies more seriously.

Note

[1]. Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Verso, 2015).

[Reproduced from H-Net under a Creative Commons License]