Rethinking Indian Literature: Dispersion, Diaspora & Expanding Boundaries Beyond Traditional Literary Canon

Time of India

16 hours ago

Excerpts from the interview:
Q: How did the two of you come to collaborate on this book? Let's start with Anjali.
Anjali:
The project started when Ulka reached out to me with this proposal and I obviously jumped at it because this idea of modern Indian and literatures, each of those terms that we query in this handbook is at the heart of everything that I do and have been doing all this while.
Right? So I was delighted when Ulka reached out to me, what was it, four and a half years ago or five years ago? She'll be able to remember the date. And it just went from there. It was like natural. She said, will you do it? And I said yes. And we just started from there.
Ulka:
The Oxford Handbook series is a very prestigious series and so I was delighted when the editor reached out and asked if I was interested in working on such a project.
The main thing for us was how Anglo-centric the Indian literary studies continues to be despite the fact that there are so obviously literature and long traditions in so many languages. But it's true in the US, it's even true in India itself. Even the study of Indian literature in English is relatively new.
For a long time in English departments, even in India, you were just studying British and American literature. So that is new. Even then there's been such a favouring of English language literature over all these other traditions. So when the editor at Oxford reached out and said we want something that focuses on India's multilingual heritage, of course I immediately thought of Anjali because I was such a fan of her book
Bombay Modern
and of course her work in multilingual Indian spheres.
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So I think it was a good match and it was something I think we were both very passionate about.
Q: Even just the title
Modern Indian Literature
packs in so much, you can dissect those three words for a very long time, isn't it, Ulka?
Ulka:
Yes, absolutely. And in fact we do spend quite a bit of time in our introduction and in all the presentations we've given dissecting those words because none of them are self-evident. It's not obvious what we mean by modern, what we mean by literatures, because when we think about the literary sphere, we often tend to think about the novel and poetry and short stories.
But recent studies of different media have shown that what we count as literature might be much more vast than that.
We have a chapter on the graphic novel, we even have a chapter on video games to really expand what we think of as literature and push those boundaries. And the term Indian itself is not self-evident, especially with the different role that different languages play within a kind of conception of India. So of course we can think about Hindi and Tamil and some of the main languages, but also languages that, you know, have a different relationship with the nation.
So we really had to piece out these different terms. And the final book is not a conclusive answer to what these terms mean, but hopefully opening it up to more questioning and more debate. And we really hope that others will take up some of these provocations that we've tried to try to propose in the introduction.
Anjali:
To add to what Ulka said about the handbook. I think one of the concepts we kept in mind when putting together this handbook was the idea of dispersion, especially because the notion of handbook is such a canon making sort of concept, a gesture, right? And along coupled with the idea of Oxford, which is another canon making gesture.
So one of the concepts that we dealt with was, or rather kept in our mind was the idea of dispersion.
So dispersion of several things, of a limited and prescriptive canon of Indian writing, of texts that must feature in this list of the disciplinary boundaries. Ulka talked about that right. Of what is literary or not literary, but also of what are regions and languages, and also of scholarly voices that usually reflect, are reflected in Anglophone tables of contents from where they speak, generally the predominance of scholars only from the Western world dominating the conversation.
So all of these ideas were at the back of our minds when we thought of this idea of dispersing this to kind of removing that centre that has been in this Anglophone Western world when talking of Indian literatures, and we hope, or we Assume, we hope that we went a little way towards that.
Q: The texts you choose to explore are unusual. When it comes to going into the minor languages, and with reference to video games etc, how did you decide to explore these boundaries?
Ulka:
So one thing I'll say is with any project like this we have an ideal TLC of what we'd like, who we like and what kind of topics we'd like covered.
But of course when you ask people can we do it, can you write this 6,000 word piece? There's many people who can't or they want to write on something else than what we would have liked them to write about. So having said that, the final project is, you know, is hopefully moves towards what we were envisioning.
It's not exactly what we were envisioning. I said we would have even wanted more attention to more minor literatures and minor in the sense of, you know, not always represented in these kind of anthologies than we had.
But we really were trying to do many things at once. We were trying to kind of present what some of the most exciting work in Indian, in contemporary literary criticism on Indian literatures in a variety of languages and also push some of the boundary. So you know, with video games as a good example, it's not, I don't think I would argue that it is definitively a literary form. But we wanted to have some places at the, in the volume where we were pushing those boundaries.
We also have a chapter on auto fiction, again, you know, always, not quite always understood as literary, but. And so we wanted to push some of these boundaries and that includes talking about literatures from, from languages where, you know, people have an ambivalent relationship with the idea of India and we wanted to use those as Places to push the boundaries. So we were trying to do many things at once. Both kind of present things that people understand as Indian and then also push the boundaries.
And we think those two things are done at once. Then you can never take a term like Indian literature for granted.
Anjali:
I remember one of the conversations we had when we went to India and talked to students about this book in September. And one of the questions that that students had was how can you subsume, for example, this was just an example. How can you subsume Tamil modernism under Indian? Right. And so the kind of way we tried to explain was that we proceed as if we already know the term, right.
What Indian is. But then in the actual chapters and in the actual work that follows, it gets queried, dismantled, reformulated.
So, for example, Tamil Modernism, or the Question of Tamil is featured here. But then we also talk about Tamil in Sri Lanka and Tamil in Singapore. A chapter goes across India and Tamil in Singapore. So the borders, the contact zone of the borders is again, one of the other concepts that we always kept in mind, this idea of relationality and contact zones which. From which we started looking at the idea of what it is that is Indian or what it is that is modern.