New Literary Histories for Nineteenth Century India
In charting the history of the modern literatures of India, literary scholars have tended to focus on the public literary sphere as it emerged in the urban centres of mid-nineteenth century India. It was in these metropolitan centres, in the complexity of the colonial context, that the modern literatures of South Asia evolved, self-consciously and deliberately establishing links with traditions, both 'classical' and more recent, even while propelling themselves forward in the spirit of the new.
By VASUDHA DALMIA AND STUART BLACKBURN
It was through these new literatures that nationalisms were imagined, that communities were newly constituted and that, as the family itself was newly defined, the domestic was sought to be cordoned off from the public. The literary sphere then, was a part of a larger cultural and political enterprise, and was constituted, as elsewhere, by literary journals, civic associations, educational groups, reading and debating clubs, amateur theatrical associations, and religious and reform associations with their manifold publications and activities.Until recently, the histories of the modern literary languages of India documented the works of this early period conscientiously and meticulously, but the grid by which they measured the literary production of the era was itself taken from the West. Scholars concerned themselves with the 'realism' of the novels, plays, and short stories (the last of the trio to emerge), the 'credibility' of the characters created, the durability, in fact, of the literary reputations established at the time. Such a textual approach has failed to appreciate and to account for the complex milieu of social, political and intellectual processes that influenced these newly emerging literatures. Existing literary histories of the period also largely ignore the fact that this literary culture was not restricted to the activity of the elites alone, whether new or old. Instead, literary production was crisscrossed by a variety of discourses. Popular cultural and artistic activities, rural and urban, not only survived and proliferated, they also interacted with the new to produce dynamic forms, such as the Parsi Theatre.
In the wake of the 'subaltern' rewriting of colonial history, the literature of the period has began to be seen as participating in much larger discursive formations and therefore should be reappraised and relocated in a wider analytical framework than that provided by conventional literary histories. In the last two decades, some monographs have appeared as have also a number of articles, scattered over journals and volumes of conference proceedings. We feel that the time has now come for us to attempt a fresh analysis of the data from new perspectives. The task we have set ourselves then, is not only to recover works forgotten and faded, lost in the files of old libraries, private and public, but also to understand the cultural politics in which the 'new' emerged. What were the breaks and continuities in patterns of patronage, of literary production and literary modes? In addition to these discursive patterns, we shall also look at empirical studies of print technology, the operations of printing presses, publishing houses, and libraries.
We start from the premise that the literary idiom from the West did not appear in a vacuum, but was acting upon rich narrative and performative traditions and sophisticated literary cultures. How did courtly poetry, the vast corpus of devotional poetry and hagiographical literature, the oral epics of remarkable magnitude and power, respond to and accommodate the new genres from the West? What new needs and sensibilities, brought about by changes in societal structures, by the introduction of radically new juridical, municipal, and educational institutions, contributed to the creation of new literary cultures? How did these in turn influence the selection of specific literary modes and features from the wide repertoire offered from the West? And when the new syntheses finally emerged, when the literary canons were reconstituted, what linkages did they establish with the past and what did they exclude? *
Vasudha Dalmia is professor of Hindi and Urdu at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies,
University of California, Berkeley, USA,
fax: +1-510-642 4565. She has published on modern Hindi literature:
Dalmia, Vasudha, 'The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harishchandra and nineteenth-century Banaras', Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Dalmia, Vasudha and Theo Damsteegt (eds), 'Narrative Strategies, Essays on South Asian Literature and Film', Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dr Stuart Blackburn teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London and specializes in Tamil folk-traditions and literature. E-mail: sb12@soas.ac.uk