LITERATURE
Creator and critic
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA
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Radicalism of the past has created a vibrant literature of social commitment.
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Unlike in Britain, literary radicalism in India was neither a monolingual nor a mono-religious affair.
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Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence; Priyamvada Gopal, Routledge, price not stated.
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Priyamvada Gopal embarks on the timely task of retracing the rich progressive corpus produced in India in the years immediately before and after independence. The result is a book (reprinted in India by Foundation Books), which sets out to show how t
he radicalism of those years created a vibrant literature of social commitment that can be said to have rivalled in scope, range and productivity its counterpart in Britain.
Progressive writers
Unlike in Britain, literary radicalism in India was neither a monolingual nor a mono-religious affair. Nor did it have an all male cast. If it can be said to lack anything, it is the growth of a specialist sub sector of left criticism of the kind represented in the “Marxised” Britain of the 1930s by the trio: Christopher Caudwell, Ralph Fox and Alick West. It is debatable, however, if it could be called a gap. For, the progressive Indian writers such as Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chugtai, Saadat Hasan Manto and K.A. Abbas, studied in this book, also doubled as critics and commentators, thus combining within their work and within their own selves the two roles of creator and critic.
The book delves into archival sources to present in its first chapter a well-documented account of the rise of the Progressive Writers Association against the backdrop of anti-colonial national struggle. Gopal highlights the movement’s cosmopolitan roots and internationalist aspirations without failing to stress its consistently national content that was, however, redeemed, as the nationalist discourse (of a Nehru, for instance) was not, by an intense self-critique.
Thus she goes on to show in the chapters on Rashid Jahan’s Angarey stories and Chugtai’s semi-autobiographical novel The Crooked Line how they turned the simple “Woman’s Question” into a complex engagement with female sexuality and gender. Manto is, likewise, shown as undertaking a similar project of undoing of masculinity in his short fiction. In the last chapter Gopal examines the cinematic work of K.A. Abbas done in collaboration with Raj Kapoor on the “Vagrant Trilogy”. This cinematic idiom uses the politically provocative ideas of sex and class equality in the service of its own agenda of fashioning the consumer citizen of a commodity-driven popular culture. The “afterword” calls for the preservation of the progressive lore, arguing its continuing relevance “to radical literary and political projects in the present day” (p. 147).
The terms of the reassessment proposed by Gopal can be seen in two things. One is her concentration on four writers belonging to the Muslim community, not for politically correct reasons, but on grounds that are ideological and aesthetic. That is to say, their writing cuts deeper to the bone of their respective communities and surroundings than that of their peers like, say Mulk Raj Anand. The other is the shift of focus from class to questions of gender, subjectivity and citizenship of an emerging nation state. The modern subject that took shape during the transition from colony to nation is shown as being marked by multiple identities and not just by class, which is the primary index of identity in a discourse governed by Marxism. Conversely, Gopal’s disruptive reading reveals modernism as the internal texture of the left-oriented progressive writing rather than as the external adversary it has been taken to be.
Focus on the historical
The best part of Gopal’s reappraisal is, however, her attempt to resist the fashionable double tendency in postcolonial studies to veer away from history and to focus exclusively on the figure of the “transnational migrant” as available only in texts in metropolitan languages.
She wants to draw attention, by contrast, to “the historical and existential actuality of the ‘internal’ migration, dislocations, indenture, exiles and wanderings as well as forced immobility that always already underwrite national communities” (p. 7).
The clichéd Derridean phrase “always already” in the above sentence is a slight cause for concern, though. It is an index of the larger problem of whether the book, liberally spiced with the jargons and buzz words of poststructuralist and postcolonial criticism (“reconstellate”, “gendered modern habitus” and “affect”, to cite a few) can engage in “straight talk” with readers beyond the confines of the metropolitan academia.
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