Flesh and Fish Blood

Subramanian Shankar's Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular is a nuanced and important contribution to the growing body of scholarship aiming to revise and rework many of the familiar premises and biases in postcolonial theory. With reference especially to a series of Tamil-language texts as well as Tamil writers working in English (such as R. K. Narayan), Shankar argues that the production of “vernacular knowledges” is a necessary corrective to the current postcolonialist bias for the transnational and the cosmopolitan.The key textual starting point for Shankar here is a specimen of modernist poetry in the Tamil language first published in 1966, by K. N. Subramanyam (also known in the Tamil literature community as Ka Na Su). Subramanyam's poem “Situation” is part of the New Poetry movement that emerged in multiple Indian languages in the 1960s, including Hindi (where it was referred to as the Naya Kavita movement) as well as Tamil, applying modernist ideas and techniques to Indian languages. “Situation,” Shankar shows, is both a reflection on a lingering colonial mentality in Indian literature (from the poem: “Introduced to / the Upanishads / by T. S. Eliot; / and to Tagore / by the early / Pound”) and an attempt at instantiating a resistance to that mentality (“neither flesh / nor fish blood / ... vociferous / in thoughts / not his own; / eloquent in words / not his own”). Shankar situates his reading of Subramanyam's poem against a cosmopolitan bias represented in Salman Rushdie's infamous comments about Indian literature from his 1997 anthology as well as associated interviews. In these statements, which have been challenged by a wide range of postcolonial studies scholars, Rushdie argues for the exclusion of writing in Indian languages from his anthology of postindependence writing on grounds of value.The key concept in Shankar's book would seem to be his particular deployment of the idea of “vernacular literature.” Here, Shankar's idea of the vernacular is not exclusively linguistic; he is, rather, arguing for postcolonial critics to pay greater attention to the “diversity of sensibility” that can be found in literary texts that are the product of particular linguistic and regional communities, rather than the cosmopolitan literary marketplace. For Shankar, a writer like R. K. Narayan may be seen as a “vernacular” postcolonial writer despite his use of the English language, because of the author's strong commitment to a realist aesthetic grounded in the cultural world he lived in and knew in Madras (Chennai). Despite these writers' vernacular sensibilities, Shankar argues, they can nevertheless be seen as cosmopolitan in certain ways—though Shankar calls their particular form of cosmopolitanism a “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” to be distinguished from “transnational cosmopolitanism” seen in diasporic literature like The Satanic Verses or the theorizations of diaspora, migrancy, and exile in Homi Bhabha's work.In the second and third chapters of Flesh and Fish Blood, Shankar explores the theme of caste in a subset of “vernacular cosmopolitan” texts from Tamil Nadu, including Narayan's 1958 novel The Guide and the Mani Ratnam film Roja. The discussion of caste is carefully situated and introduced with reference to relevant scholarship in the anthropology of caste, including scholarship by Nicholas Dirks and Susan Bayly as well as public arguments by writers and activists such as E. V. Ramasamy and Kancha Ilaiah.Going against a postcolonial literary critical tradition that has situated Narayan as a “quaint” novelist who remained above issues of politics and caste, Shankar argues that Narayan's novel is in fact deeply involved with debates in the Tamil public sphere over the status and meaning of the Tamil version of the Ramayana (the Kamban Ramayana). The hegemony of a certain Vedic and Brahminical practice of Hinduism had, beginning in the 1950s, been challenged by the Dalit activists associated with Ramasamy, who claimed that the Hindu epic was in effect promoting both North Indian (“Aryan”) hegemony over South Indian (“Dravidian”) society and promoting Brahmin oppression of non-Brahmins, especially Dalits. Despite some clear evidence that Narayan does engage the rising of Ramasamy's Dalit intellectual sensibility, ultimately Shankar finds Narayan's attitude to caste disappointing because of what he finds to be “upper-caste bias in Narayan's work.”In a fascinating turn, Shankar moves from his attentive and thought-provoking reading of Narayan's novel (written in English, but with a vernacular sensibility) to the 1965 film adaptation of the novel (made in Hindi for a national Indian audience). And it is here that the real stakes of Shankar's particular approach to vernacular writing become evident. For while Narayan's novel is clearly grounded in the cultural world and intellectual milieu of Tamil Nadu, it also aims to tell a story with “national” implications. As Shankar puts it, “The Guide may be read as a novel of the nation—not a national allegory like Midnight's Children, but rather a novel of the nation—not a national allegory like Midnight's Children, but rather a novel that explores aspects of national self-imagination” (55). This distinction is relevant given that the Hindi film adaptation seems to eschew the Tamil specificity of the novel, and foregrounds instead a kind of pastiche image of Indian national culture. Shankar is similarly compelling when in chapter 4 of Flesh and Fish Blood (focused on the “problem” of translation) he explores the differences between the Tamil and the Hindi versions of Roja, in which a parallel pattern of effacement of the local is also seen.What becomes clear from Shankar's various readings is that his approach to the vernacular, while clear and efficacious, is highly contextual. Thus a Hindi-language film may aim to subsume local and regional particularities in the interest of a kind of hegemonic Indian nationalism that an English-language novel deeply grounded in a Tamil cultural space might resist. In other contexts, however, it is precisely a voice like Narayan's that an emergent community of Dalit writers might be aiming to critique (explored in chapter 3) in the interest of challenging his upper-caste biases—and of course in the broader interest of asserting their humanity. Though postcolonialists have long looked for an easy way to find the “authentic” voice of the other (and Spivak's “subaltern” epitomizes that kind of conceptual shortcut), in fact questions of privilege, emplacement, and authenticity are much too fraught for any one theoretical formula to adhere universally.While Shankar's particular readings are focused on a particular set of Tamil texts, he is scrupulous in exploring the theoretical bases of his methodology in ways that should be provocative for scholars not directly invested in this particular region. And that methodology (which might be reductively named “vernacular postcolonialism”) would appear to be relevant to emergent literary communities all over South Asia, as well as other parts of the formerly colonized world. Thus Shankar's Flesh and Fish Blood should be of interest to a broad swath of critics and theorists interested in issues of representation under conditions of inequality. The later chapters (and especially the conclusion) should also be of interest to scholars engaged in rethinking the idea of comparative literature through the lens of translation. All of that is another way of saying that while Shankar's own work may be seen as a product of a “vernacular” (or “regional”) scholarly orientation, it is structured and written so as to be a starting point for a conversation whose stakes are broad and general

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