The Idea of Indian Literature

Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method

Bibliographic Data

ID8910302
AuthorsAliya Ram (Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume60
Issue3
Pages610-613
Publication date2023-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueComparative Literature Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0010-4132 • E-ISSN: 1528-4212
PublisherThe Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5325/complitstudies.60.3.0610
OpenAlexW4386462382
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Can you address someone in a language that they don’t know?This question is answered by a paradox: you can’t, and yet you might. In her remarkable first book, The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2022), Preetha Mani traces the contours of this paradox by asking how different linguistic communities came to inhabit a single literary field in South Asia. Her investigations produce an exacting historical and textual study of multilingualism, wrought through India’s language politics and history. The book shows that a utopian ambition undergirds both Indian literature and Comparative Literature more broadly. This is Mani’s central move, to argue that the idea of Indian literature is, in a microcosmic way, the idea of the discipline at large: “a literary field threatened [by] dissolution by the very components it longs to bring together” (195).The Idea of Indian Literature discusses canonical figures from Indian literary history, juxtaposing texts that were written in Hindi and Tamil before and after independence. Taken together, the book’s five chapters cover a vast terrain, ranging from the Progressive Writers’ Association, which was prominent in London and north India, and the Hindi nayī kahānī movement, to the Maṇikkoṭi writers’ circle in Madras, and Tamil literature associated with the Eḻuttu magazine. The writers Mani focuses on include Premchand, Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, Mannu Bhandari, and Rajendra Yadav in Hindi, and C. S. Chellappa, R. Chudamani, D. Jayakanthan, Pudumaippittan, and Ka. Naa. Subramanyam in Tamil. Mani’s historicist and philological method allows her to maneuver across these writers’ works by tracking the mutation of concepts over time and across languages. For example, she identifies a “rift” between premodern and modern scholars on the topic of vernacularization (6). Premodern scholars, the book argues, tend to understand “the vernacular” as “revolutionary and complementary to the cosmopolitan,” while scholars working on the early modern, colonial, and postcolonial periods endeavor to “qualify, repudiate or reverse its inferior and provincialized status” (7). She attributes this difference to the emergence of a “new vernacularization” in the nineteenth century, which placed Indian languages in a vexed relationship to English.The book’s first chapter establishes Mani’s preferred “multiscalar” approach to literary comparison, shaped by scholarship from Francesca Orsini, Aamir Mufti, and the Warwick Research Collective (40). This approach tracks literature on several levels at once: the local, the regional, the national, and the international. According to Mani, the “idea of Indian literature” emerges out of performed “acts of ‘worlding’” by texts that circulate among—and produce—reading publics on several levels at once (193). This approach complicates Benedict Anderson’s formula of the nation as an “imagined community” by showing that short stories often address multiple audiences, which are themselves contested, fragmented, divergent, and layered.The book’s second and fourth chapters turn their attention to gender and genre, arguing that the short story played a key role in late-colonial literary expression on the subcontinent. In particular, the chapters show that gender and genre fall into step in this period as the “aesthetic nodes around which the idea of Indian literature starts to crystallize” (28). For example, Mani argues that the short story’s brevity allowed Premchand and Pudumaippittan to cite typological female characters instead of engaging in extended character development. This meant that they could unmoor their women characters from traditional gender roles and propel their stories to central “emotional event[s]” (83). Mani’s readings of commonly circulating female “types” such as the “licentious, westernized modern girl” are deft and illuminating (85). She ultimately shows that the short story allowed writers such as Premchand and Pudumaippittan to “retain, rather than resolve, the enigma of feminine desire” and thereby achieve affective resonance with their readers (28). Taken together, these chapters suggest that the “new woman” became the means of working through communal and caste relations in the postcolonial period: “The figure of the new woman facilitated this transposability [between readers and characters] by expressing the struggle to express and fulfill feminine desire as symbolic of the broader quest for human connection precipitated by postcolonial disconsolation” (126). This argument has broader applicability to other postcolonial contexts in which women’s freedom is the terrain on which questions of independence and rights are negotiated.The Idea of Indian Literature adopts a different register in the third chapter to enter debates about genre and post-coloniality. This chapter argues that “modernist realism” is a particular “postcolonial mode” characterized by ambivalent aesthetic affiliations, as well as the use of situated literary histories, rhetorical devices, and aesthetic techniques (98). Mani has earlier written about this issue in the essay, “What Was So New about the New Story? Modernist Realism in the Hindi Nayī Kahānī,” published in Comparative Literature 71, no. 3 (2019), and here too her work demonstrates the insufficiency of a Cold War era bifurcation of literary modes into modernism and realism. The Idea of Indian Literature follows this argument into a discussion of women’s writing in the fifth chapter, which examines how Bhandari and Chudamani use modernist realism as a language of entitlement that “inaugurat[es] a new literary humanist tradition of women’s writing” (163).Mani’s juxtaposition of Hindi and Tamil literatures allows her to develop arguments comparatively, and arrive at textured and nuanced conclusions. The Hindi context opens up the Marxist-Leninist dimension of Indian cultural history, for example, while the Tamil context enables a discussion of ethno-linguistic nationalisms (45). Centering Hindi and Tamil, however, directs Mani away from the structuring role that religious communitarianism played in the consolidation of Indian literature as an idea. There is a missed opportunity here. Mani might have productively examined the splitting of Hindi and Urdu along sectarian lines, as well as the suppression of Arabic and Persian from languages newly coded as “Indian.” However, the oversight in many ways proves Mani’s central claim that Indian literature is metonymic of Comparative Literature: a field perpetually haunted by what it has not included. Indeed, one of the pedagogical virtues of The Idea of Indian Literature is that it skips the handwringing and commits boldly to its arguments, which are summarized in a short post-face: “Ten Theses on Indian Literature.”The Idea of Indian Literature is timely, both within the academy and outside it. In the context of literary scholarship, it demonstrates how to unite theoretical, historical, and philological analysis at a time when scholars cannot agree on how best to pivot from the specific to the general. It is also timely given the debate in India right now about government plans to revamp school textbooks, deleting sections about communal violence, caste discrimination, and majoritarianism. Mani’s book indirectly makes sense in the context of resurgent ethno-nationalism by showing the utopian impulse that motivated the idea of Indian literature—and the anxieties about particulars and untranslatables that continue to keep its expansionist ambitions in check.The Idea of Indian Literature makes a crucial contribution to debates about literary comparison by showing that fiction addresses multiscalar and multilingual reading publics. Mani’s conclusions interface with scholarship on multilingualism, world literature, vernacularization, translatability, language politics, and postcolonial modernities by demonstrating that modern ideas about the traffickability of aesthetic forms rely on the paradox that literature can address readers from multiple language communities. The book shows that writers both consolidate power and brook danger when they world their texts in this way

Art · Comparative literature · Hindi · Hindi literature · Hinduism · History of literature · Indian literature · Linguistics · Literary language · Literature · Sociology · Tamil · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Conflicts

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