|
Literary Review
ESSAYS
Charting new lands
VIJAY NAMBISAN
|
Literary discourse moves into new territory with this book.
|
Elusive Terrain: Culture and Literary Memory; Meenakshi Mukherjee, Oxford University Press, Rs 575
This collection of essays, all written since 2000, helps drag literary discourse out of the postcolonial mire and into fresh landscapes that are only beginning to be mapped. Their continued charting is necessary for the health of academic theory, university departments and writers alike.
The essays are grouped in two sections: seven under “Locality of Culture” and six under “Uses of the Past”. Very loosely, the first features language and the second memory, but the entire book is the dharma-kshetra of the two. It is Dr Mukherjee’s great strength that she never writes to make a point that has been made before, so each essay is rich in insights.
In the first, ‘English in an uneven land’, Mukherjee dismisses the mother tongue debate as jejune (and about time, too) to make some important points about the English market itself. Is there, intellectually, a level playing field? Why are Indian translations not marketed worldwide while Portuguese, Turkish and Slovenian are? These are questions for others than translators and theorists to answer.
New market
The new English market has also affected the volume of translation between other Indian languages. It is often assumed that that is something easier to do. In a later essay, Mukherjee writes of her own experience of translating a Hindi novel into Bangla, and questions these preconceptions. She also asks why Bangla is a giver of translations and hardly ever a taker.
‘The house and the road’ is a fascinating piece, in which Mukherjee shows some striking similarities between the Bibhutibhusan Banerjee novel Pather Panchali and the Naipaul novel A House for Mr Biswas. Of course, there are signal differences too, notably of tone. Naipaul’s (one need hardly say Biswas’s) is a tone of scorn and rebellion, Apu’s of wonder and acceptance. By highlighting the attitudes of the writers, Mukherjee alerts us to the nature of nostalgia itself.
The last essay in this section, ‘Mapping an elusive terrain’, is as useful as it is interesting. It follows five issues which have been topics of debate in the last 50 years in India: progressivism, modernism, feminism, Dalit literature and translation. Mukherjee begins with “art and ideas” but ends with “market and media” which, she adds, is “symptomatic of the distance we have traversed in independent India”. Quite so.
The second section is full of powerful stuff. What does history consist of? Why and how do we choose to remember what we remember? Is there a conscious effort involved, or only vast accidents of history? The radical nationalist Virendranath Chattopadhyay, who fought in European exile for India’s freedom through the 1920s, is forgotten today. This is because the non-violent movement rejected him. Yet other freedom fighters who used violence are celebrated. And if ‘Chatto’ is forgotten by India, triply so is his too-devoted mistress, Agnes Smedley, who clawed her way out of poverty and illiteracy in the US to a consciousness of worldwide injustice. Gender issues are involved here: Chatto and the other Indian exiles used Smedley much as Britain used India. Whom do we sympathise with? On whose side is history?
Similarly marginalised are the compelling late-19th century accounts of two women who converted to Christianity because their husbands had. They attempted to resist, they held out for some years; but there was no place left in the traditional Hindu system for them. The missionaries, glorying in the conversion of brahmin men, were not interested in their wives’ spiritual and physical distress.
Traditional patriarchy naturally wished to forget its failures, especially as both women made new and personal relationships with their husbands once outside the joint family. But we are supposed to know better, a century afterwards. Why are these not seminal texts today?
Significant
What I thought the most significant part of the book follows. In two brilliant and original essays, Mukherjee shows, first, how Romesh Chunder Dutt reconstructed an Indian past based on James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan; and, second, how Tod’s own work had been an exercise in romantic myth-making, excluding all that did not fit his theme. The logic is easy to follow. The British looked down upon Bengalis as an effete race. The Bengalis had no warrior heroes of their own. To reconstruct a heroic past, they had to appropriate Rajput and Maratha heroes. Thus the idea of the nation had to expand to become pan-Indian.
A nationalist movement needs a common foe. In the confidence of the British (Dutt was an ICS man), the new myth-makers could not make their actual and current oppressors that foe. So taking a leaf out of Tod, and conveniently ignoring the many internecine Rajput feuds and the many Rajput-Mughal alliances, they chose the Mughal as the focus of hatred. Throughout the 19th century, the Bengalis were without a doubt the best-educated race in India, versed both in British and Indian ways. The dissemination of their wisdom across India was easy. Thus were a nation, and a past, forged.
Of course I’m simplifying, and Mukherjee is interested in the process, not the polemics. The brevity imposed on me leaves no space for quotation. The two essays cited are followed by ‘Narrating a nation’, a heartfelt questioning of whether there is such a thing as Indian identity. Problems of narration; and then problems of theory. The last essay, ‘Whose centre, which periphery?’ subverts the language of criticism which has been taken for granted for too long. If “a millennial paradigm shift” is necessary, let it be understood that none of us stands on solid ground for very long – neither writer nor critic.
Mukherjee’s prose is always easy, often delightful, even to the uninitiated, like me — more so than practically any other academic’s of her standing. A book like this has no narrow appeal, and I wonder it should not find a more populist imprint at a reader-friendlier price. Particularly as Oxford’s editing and proofreading are at low tide.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
