The Audacious Raconteur

In her conclusion, Leela Prasad reprises the story of the monkey-god Hanuman's tail and the tale he narrated of Rama's life. Through his inflammatory tail Hanuman subjugated the might of the demon king Ravana, and his hypnotic tale immortalized the story of Rama. The power of storytelling, Prasad shows, has the ability to demolish the hubris of hegemons, opening up space for “counter-hegemonic sovereignty that is at once epistemic and resilient” (159). In the book Prasad recounts the powerful narratives of four “audacious raconteurs,” who, while they lived variously under the material and psychological constraint that was colonialism, told stories that refused to yield “that acre of ground” (1) that makes a subject sovereign. This subjectivity was more than subaltern resistance or the hidden transcript of the oppressed. It was a bold sovereignty that asserted itself through narration, denying sovereignty to the “ethnographic state.” It was in the routine cannibalization of the effort of the “native scholar” or the appropriation of the stories of the “old ayah,” accomplished through deploying the tropes of scientism, that colonial anthropology and folklore flourished. However, there were Indians who refused to concede power over their narratives and provided clear-eyed critiques of the colonial shibboleths of modernism, civilization, and progress.The first of Prasad's raconteurs is Anna Liberata de Souza, whose repertoire of oral stories Mary Frere, the daughter of the governor of Bombay, collected and published as the Old Deccan Days (1868). Via a “sense reading” of the “narrator's narrative”—an autobiographical vignette of Anna's life that Frere included in the book—Prasad uncovers Anna's voice through an intuitive reading of inarticulate meaning of experience (26). Prasad demonstrates the gradual receding of Anna's presence in the subsequent editions of a highly successful book that became increasingly Mary's, in a typical appropriation of Anna's stories, while Anna remained in oblivion and pecunious. Prasad underlines Anna's refusal to surrender her autonomy, despite serving as ayah in eight different Anglo households. Despite the poverty of her material circumstances, Anna cherished the rich memories of her agential mother, grandmother, and other mesmerizing storytellers, and asserted her sovereignty by refusing to buy into the promise of modernity, proffered through the lures of the English language or extolled through the empty rhetoric of economic prosperity.Prasad discusses the prolific output in different genres of her second raconteur, P. V. Ramaswamy Raju, emphasizing his sovereignty through his ability to speak in “double register,” words that carried multiple meanings across different languages and cultures. This strategy allowed him to praise and critique simultaneously; a double articulation that exposed the conceits of the empire. Raju's most significant work, written in the itihāsa-purāṇa tradition, was the Srīmat Rājāṅgala Mahodyānam (The Great Park of Rajangala, 1894). Conceived as an epic of Samanya Bharat, India in a distant future, it relates the rise and demise of many rulers, including the English, depicted as living in a nameless speck of an island, the progeny of a gandharva dismissed from Indra's court. Written in Sanskrit with an English translation by Raju writing as a paurāṇika, it is in the “absent translation,” aspects and phrases left untranslated, that he creates a “third poetic space,” critical and sovereign, a mythical mode that was a counterstatement on history itself (75).The self-published M. N. Venkataswami, of Medara untouchable caste, wrote in English but suffused his writing with the many languages he inhabited, utilizing multiple genres—biography, history, folktale—to unravel the vanity of objectivity and scientific anthropology practiced by colonial scholars. Prasad demonstrates how Venkataswami insisted on the “subjective lens,” refusing the racist premise of colonial scientism (89) that reduced Indians to “natives,” whereas Venkataswami “peopled” his narratives with “vernacular abundance,” acknowledging his numerous relatives as resourceful informers. His biography of his father M. Nagloo (Nagaya) restored him as one of the four founders of the Nagpur city, refusing erasure as also the condescension of the upper-caste Indians who looked at Nagloo through the prism of caste/pariah. Venkataswami wrote “ample history” that was at once storied, mythical, and multiperspectival (106); and he wrote folk stories where the multilingual women of his family emerged as narrators.Last, Prasad writes of the polyglot epigraphist, prolific folklorist, essayist, and novelist S. M. Natesa Sastri, the quintessential “native scholar” of erudition and expertise, whose authorial self was “kaleidoscopic,” setting limits on “native subordination” as he established sovereignty in fields that routinely exploited “native knowledge” (140).In this compelling and persuasively written book, Prasad makes the concept of sovereignty capacious to accommodate counterhegemonic lives and stories; she, as much as her protagonists, achieves narrative justice through practicing narratological ethics. Prasad's storytellers were inveterate polyglots unfazed by language barriers, not monolingual chauvinists of today's India. Her protagonists told tales that were true to their histories and people, and Prasad, by recounting their stories and struggles, tells us how we can practice retrospective justice. Moreover, Prasad, through her own decades-long ethnographic practice, demonstrates why establishing human connections (as she does with the raconteurs' progeny), making place for serendipity, and patient and resourceful research always comes up trumps. This is a book that should be read by storytellers, ethnographers, and postcolonial scholars for its innovative concepts, recuperative politics, and luminescent prose

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