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Indian Literature and the World RossellaCiocca(cid:129)NeelamSrivastava Editors Indian Literature and the World Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere Editors RossellaCiocca NeelamSrivastava EnglishandAnglophoneLiteratures SchoolofEnglish UniversityofNaples‘L’Orientale’ NewcastleUniversity Naples,Italy NewcastleuponTyne UnitedKingdom ISBN978-1-137-54549-7 ISBN978-1-137-54550-3(eBook) DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3 LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2017936368 ©TheEditor(s)(ifapplicable)andTheAuthor(s)2017 Theauthor(s)has/haveassertedtheirright(s)tobeidentifiedastheauthor(s)ofthisworkin accordancewiththeCopyright,DesignsandPatentsAct1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,whetherthewholeorpartofthematerialisconcerned,specificallytherightsof translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilarmethodology nowknownorhereafterdeveloped. Theuseofgeneraldescriptivenames,registerednames,trademarks,servicemarks,etc.inthis publicationdoesnotimply,evenintheabsenceofaspecificstatement,thatsuchnamesare exemptfromtherelevantprotectivelawsandregulationsandthereforefreeforgeneraluse. Thepublisher,theauthorsandtheeditorsaresafetoassumethattheadviceandinformation in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect tothematerialcontainedhereinorforanyerrorsoromissionsthatmayhavebeenmade. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutionalaffiliations. Coverillustration:CulturaRM/AlamyStockPhoto Printedonacid-freepaper ThisPalgraveMacmillanimprintispublishedbySpringerNature TheregisteredcompanyisMacmillanPublishersLtd. Theregisteredcompanyaddressis:TheCampus,4CrinanStreet,London,N19XW, UnitedKingdom C ONTENTS Introduction:Indian Literatureand the World 1 Rossella Ciocca andNeelamSrivastava PartI ComparingMultilingual Perspectives Pre-NationandPost-Colony: 1947in Qurratulain Hyder’sMy Temples, TooandSalmanRushdie’s Midnight’s Children 35 RajeswariSunder Rajan ReadingTogether:Hindi,Urdu, andEnglish VillageNovels 61 Francesca Orsini Choosing aTongue, Choosinga Form: KamalaDas’s BilingualAlgorithms 87 UdayaKumar PartII Enlargingthe World Literary Canon:NewVoices andTranslation AMultiple Addressivity:Indian Subaltern Autobiographies andthe Role ofTranslation 105 NeelamSrivastava v vi CONTENTS The ModernTamil Novel:Changing Identities andTransformations 135 Lakshmi Holmström The Voicesof KrishnaSobti inthe Polyphonic Canon of IndianLiterature 153 Stefania Cavaliere PartIII GlobalizedIndian PublicSpheres Resisting SlowViolence:Writing, Activism, andEnvironmentalism 177 AlessandraMarino The Novelandthe North-East: IndigenousNarratives in IndianLiteratures 199 Mara Matta From Nationto World:Bombay/Mumbai Fictions andthe Urban PublicSphere 223 Rossella Ciocca The Individualand the CollectiveinContemporaryIndia: ManjuKapur’s Homeand Custody 245 MaryamMirza ‘Homeis aPlace You’veNeverBeen to’: AWoman’s Place in the IndianDiasporic Novel 263 Clelia Clini Index 283 Introduction: Indian Literature and the World Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava In what follows, we propose a working model of contemporary Indian literature characterized by four features: firstly, it is multilingual, hence our volume draws on the specific linguistic expertise of scholars whose work is included in the collection; secondly, it is translational, so we consider the process and politics of translation as central to the construc- tionofapan-Indiancanon(alsothroughthecontributionofcontempor- ary publishing practices); thirdly, it is comparative, because it is necessary toconceiveofIndianliteraturesinthepluralwhilearguingfortheimpor- tance of comparing these literatures with each other as a way forward for scholarship; fourthly, it is a simultaneously located and internationalist literature, which we understand as being premised on a multilingual literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Rather than attempting to approximate Indian literature to the fashionable centre– periphery model adopted by critics who have used world-systems theory to restructure the modern literary field, we look at its enduring R.Ciocca(*) EnglishandAnglophoneLiteratures,UniversityofNaples‘L’Orientale’, Naples,Italy e-mail:[email protected] N.Srivastava SchoolofEnglish,NewcastleUniversity,NewcastleuponTyne,UnitedKingdom e-mail:[email protected] ©TheAuthor(s)2017 1 R.Ciocca,N.Srivastava(eds.),IndianLiteratureandtheWorld, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_1 2 R.CIOCCAANDN.SRIVASTAVA engagementwiththepublicsphereandwithpoliticalresistancethrougha varietyofnarrativeandpoeticformswhichdefyanycategorizationwithin a singular model of literary modernism and which emanate from the capitalist centres and are reappropriated by the peripheries (pace WReC, 2015: 14). Engaging inrecent debates about the limitations of postcolo- nialtheoreticalapproachestoliterature,thiseditedcollectionaimstooffer a different picture of contemporary Indian writing than what is currently availabletoday.1 BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL Thepurviewofpostcolonialstudieshasmainlyfocusedonthecontoursof writing in English or in the other ex-colonial languages, beginning with Ashcroft,Griffiths,andTiffin’sseminaldefinitionofthefieldin1989,with the publication of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post- ColonialLiterature(whereitshouldbenotedthatthenoun‘literature’is very much in the singular). As a result, postcolonial literary studies has been structured around a vast but still limited corpus of works. The field has developed in several rich directions since the publication of seminal texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985), the collection of essays Europe and Its Others (Barker et al. 1985) which came out of the cele- bratedeponymous1984conferenceattheUniversityofEssex,andRobert Young’s White Mythologies (White Mythologies (1990), to name just a few oftheworksthathavedelineatedthecontoursofthefieldwenowknowas postcolonialstudies.Whileintersectionsandcross-pollinationsabound,it isneverthelesshelpfultodistinguishbetweenthevastbodyofpostcolonial theory that has emerged since the early 1980s, and the research in post- colonial literatures that has led to the field’s institutionalization within universityteachingcurriculainEnglishLiteraturedepartments,andwhich built on older models of Commonwealth or ‘new national’ literatures coming out of recently decolonized regions. The gesturing of Ashcroft, Griffiths,andTiffintothemanyregionalvarietiesof‘post-coloniallitera- ture’ developing in the new nations of the erstwhile British Empire was followed by the expansion of subfields such as Caribbean literature, African literature, Pacific/Australian/New Zealand literature, Canadian literature, and Indian literature (though of course significant scholarship was being produced on such writing well before the academic institutio- nalizationofpostcolonialstudies).Animportantdevelopmenthasbeenin INTRODUCTION:INDIANLITERATUREANDTHEWORLD 3 the area of postcolonial book history and print cultures, which focus attention on the ‘postcolonial text’ as material production within the cultural industry and institutions of literary value (see Huggan 2001; Brouillette2007; Sadana2012). Particularly in India, the founding idea of a postcolonial literature was historicallybuiltaroundaprimarilyAnglophonecanonoftexts.2Itmaybe worth recalling, once again, Salman Rushdie’s blithe pronouncement regarding a supposed hierarchy between Indian prose writing in English andin thevernacular languages post-1947:the former,he claimed, isprovingtobeastrongerandmoreimportantbodyofworkthanmostof whathasbeenproducedinthe16‘officiallanguages’ofIndia,theso-called ‘vernacularlanguages’[...]‘Indo-Anglianliterature’representsperhapsthe most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. (Rushdie1997:x). This book is our counterargument to Rushdie’s statement. Given India’s myriadculturalandlinguisticvarieties,itisallthemoreimperativetoopen up critical approaches to a wider and much more multilingual survey of contemporary writing from the subcontinent. There is still a sharp divide betweenthestudyofSouthAsianlanguagesandliteraturesandpostcolo- nialliterarystudies,andevenmoresobetweentheseandthefieldofworld literarystudies.Thestudyof‘postcolonialIndianliterature’tendstoimply a mostly Anglophone focus, because it is mainly situated in English Literature departments, whence postcolonial studies first originated (though the term ‘post-colonial’ was initially used as a historical marker fornationsandregionsthathadundergonethedecolonizationprocess).3 Moreover, what might be called the ‘teaching canon’ of postcolonial Indian literature rarely includes Indian literature in English translation, and only considers a small body of texts written in English. Thus post- colonial literature, especially as shaped by university syllabi and degree course specifications, has tended to produce a monolingual canon. This focus has restricted the genre’s usefulness for exploring the multicultural and polyglot context of literary production in postcolonial South Asia, as well as fostering a schizophrenic view of Indian literature as divided between literature in the bhashas (Indian indigenous languages) and lit- eratureproducedinEnglish.Scholarshavecalledforthedevelopmentofa differentmodelofscholarshipinordertounderstandhowtoapproachthis complex field, which has been strangely bisected into Asian languages/ 4 R.CIOCCAANDN.SRIVASTAVA South Asian area studies disciplinary approaches on the one hand, and postcolonial studies approaches on the other, with little communication between the two. Indeed, Neil Lazarus has criticized not only the linguistic scope of postcolonialreadingcanonsbuttheverysubstanceoftheircriticalagenda, lamenting the fact that very often ‘the same questions tend to be asked, the same methods used, the same concepts mobilized’ (2011: 18). Without wholly espousing this assessment, but instead retaining much of thepoliticalurgencyandtheoreticalawarenesstheterm‘postcolonial’has carried with it, we would like nonetheless to enlarge our interpretative perspective.4 One of our aims is to recuperate a linguistic competence more strictly conversant with Indian literary production, and which has historically belonged to area studies, a field that has been perhaps too hastily dismissed in metropolitan academic circles as constitutively Orientalist. The aim of refocusing our attention on linguistic expertise is not meant to exclude English, but to assess its relative importance in the multilingual spectrumof India. In short, we are convinced that literature can and should be studied withcloseattentiontooriginallanguagesandcontexts,andthuswedeem particularly welcome contributions offered from a wider range of area expertise and linguistic knowledge, and which combine the urge to con- textualize, typical of postcolonial approaches, with a more direct field experienceguaranteed byspecialisms. THE QUESTION OF MULTILINGUALISM IN INDIA AsRita Kothari andJudyWakabayashi remark: Indians moved within a multilingual structure, not necessarily thinking of theselanguagesasdifferentlanguages,butratherasdifferentregistersofthe same language, each with a specific task—almost as if languages had their own caste system and were assigned different jobs. In India, moving from one language or dialect to another did not seem to constitute an act of translation, but merely a confirmation of a multilingual world not overtly consciousofitsownmultilingualism.(2009:12–13). Indiaisalsooneoftheveryfewplaceswhereyouhavethephenomenonof writers who produce creative work in two languages: the poet Arun Kolatkarforexample,whowritesinMarathiandEnglish.Otherexamples

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