Heritage and Ruptures
in Indian Literature,
Culture and Cinema
Heritage and Ruptures
in Indian Literature,
Culture and Cinema
Edited by
Cornelius Crowley,
Geetha Ganapathy-Doré
and Michel Naumann
Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema
Edited by Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré
and Michel Naumann
This book first published 2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2017 by Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré,
Michel Naumann and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9887-2
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9887-4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................... ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................ xi
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... xiii
LITERATURE
CHAPTER ONE .............................................................................................. 3
IN THE CITY THEY COME AND GO: DIALOGICAL MODERNISM IN INDIAN
ENGLISH POETRY
DEBASISH LAHIRI
CHAPTER TWO ........................................................................................... 23
THREE GENERATIONS OF MIGRANCY IN KIRAN DESAI’S THE INHERITANCE
OF LOSS: THE FOCUS ON MATERIAL THINGS
CELIA WALLHEAD
CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................ 39
COMMUNITY RUPTURES: INDIVIDUAL REFASHIONINGS OF POSTCOLONIAL
DIASPORIC LIFE IN HANIF KUREISHI’S SOMETHING TO TELL YOU
MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU
CHAPTER FOUR .......................................................................................... 53
A SHAMEFUL AND DEADLY LEGACY: RAPE, INCEST AND PARRICIDE
IN ACHMAT DANGOR'S BITTER FRUIT AND SHANI MOOTOO’S CEREUS
BLOOMS AT NIGHT
TINA HARPIN
CHAPTER FIVE............................................................................................ 79
‘WHO SHALL INHERIT BENGAL?’ A READING OF ANURADHA ROY’S
AN ATLAS OF IMPOSSIBLE LONGING
EVELYNE HANQUART-TURNER
vi
Table of Contents
CHAPTER SIX.............................................................................................. 87
TRANSCENDING THE DUAL HERITAGE OF EXILE IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S
FICTION: THE IMPERIOUS DESIRE FOR A CHOSEN REALM
AHMED MULLA
CHAPTER SEVEN ........................................................................................ 97
FAMILY, GEOGRAPHY, AND IDEOLOGY IN JHUMPA LAHIRI’S THE LOWLAND
GEETHA GANAPATHY-DORÉ
CHAPTER EIGHT ....................................................................................... 109
COOPERATION OF OPPOSITES: THE HOME AND THE FOREIGN
IN R. K. NARAYAN’S NOVELS
LUDMILA VOLNÁ
CHAPTER NINE ......................................................................................... 121
THE RUPTURE WITHIN: MANIMEKALAI’S POLEMICS WITH BUDDHISM
R. AZHAGARASAN
CULTURE
CHAPTER TEN .......................................................................................... 143
THE LEGACY OF THE HASTINGS CIRCLE: HERITAGE OR RUPTURE?
MADHU JAIN BENOIT
CHAPTER ELEVEN .................................................................................... 159
SIR SAYYID AHMAD KHAN’S NEW APPROACH TO THE MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN
RELATIONSHIP IN THE CONTEXT OF BRITISH INDIA: A RUPTURE WITH OLD
PRACTICES?
BELKACEM BELMEKKI
CHAPTER TWELVE.................................................................................... 169
RUPTURED HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE IN MYANMAR
SHRUTI DAS
CINEMA
CHAPTER THIRTEEN ................................................................................. 185
HERITAGE AND RUPTURES: THE HERO’S IDENTITY NEGOTIATIONS
IN THE CINEMATIC ADAPTATIONS OF DEVDAS
JITKA DE PREVAL
Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema
vii
CHAPTER FOURTEEN ................................................................................ 203
HERITAGE OR RUPTURE IN TWO BRITISH ASIAN FILMS: EAST IS EAST
AND WEST IS WEST
CAROLINE TRECH
THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
CHAPTER FIFTEEN .................................................................................... 217
HERITAGE AND RUPTURES: A FINE BALANCE DIFFICULT TO OBTAIN
(AND SOME QUESTIONS AROUND GENDER)
RADA IVEKOVIC
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ....................................................................... 237
ABSTRACTS .............................................................................................. 245
NOTICES BIOGRAPHIQUES DES AUTEURS .................................................. 255
RESUMES DES ARTICLES ........................................................................... 263
INDEX ....................................................................................................... 273
LIST OF FIGURES
1. The Devadasis of Coromandel............................................................. 145
2. Frontispiece of John Dryden’s play, Aureng-Zebe .............................. 146
3. K.L. Saigal playing Devdas ................................................................. 188
4. Dilip Kumar playing Devdas ............................................................... 189
5. Shah Rukh Khan playing Devdas ........................................................ 189
6. Abhay Deol playing Devdas ................................................................ 190
7. Ella and her children rising against George East is East ..................... 205
8. Sajid in West is West on the way to school with his father George ..... 207
9. Last picture of Sajid back in England in West is West ......................... 213
The illustrations in this book are used for academic purposes and are cited
in accordance with the fair use clause of copyright regulations.
ACK
KNOWLED
DGEMENT
TS
would like to thank the folllowing instituttions:
The editors w
The Regionaal Council of Île de France.
The Embasssy of India.
The Centre for Research on English Studies (CREA
A) of the Univ
versity of
Paris West Nanterre annd the Centre for Researrch on Spacee/Writing
(CREE) of tthe Universityy of Paris Wesst Nanterre.
The Researcch Commissioon of the Uniiversity of Parris 13, Sorbon
nne Paris
Cité.
C
for
The Facultyy of Law, Soocial and Pollitical Sciencees and the Centre
Studies and Research in Administrativ
ve and Politiccal Sciences (CERAP),
University oof Paris Sorbonne Paris Citéé.
The Societyy for Activitiees and Researrch on the Inddian world (S
SARI) for
their generous support forr this project.
INTRODUCTION
In the postcolonial theoretical framework, the study of heritage and
ruptures is a rather familiar paradigm. But it is not a depleted one. Given
the millennial history of the Indian subcontinent and the plurality of its
culture, the way its languages, literatures and arts appropriate the past,
grasp the present and envisage the future remains a relevant object of
inquiry.
While a patrimonial and conservative perspective, with its backwardlooking cult of heritage, views heritage as pertaining to affiliation,
preservation, enrichment, claiming and transmission, the logic of
capitalism requires the commoditized availability of the vestiges of a
heritage. Such a yearning, at the heart of conservative nostalgia, has given
rise to a “sentimental” form of capitalism in which dispossession is
masked as urban revitalization.1 The alternative logic of “creativedestruction” is involved in the process of liquidating it.
As early as 1921 T.S. Eliot warned that tradition did not boil down to
“following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or
timid adherence to its successes” and that it was, in fact, a “matter of much
wider significance” because it “involves a perception not only of the
pastness of the past but of its presence.” He wanted us to accept the idea
that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is
directed by the past.”2
Jacques Derrida taught us in 1993 that inheritance might also be taken
to include not only what it means in an unequivocal way but also what it
“enjoins, in a way that is contradictory and contradictorily binding.” He
contended that heritage is an active and selective affirmation that can
sometimes be revived and reasserted much more by illegitimate heirs than
by legitimate ones. If Derrida’s conceptualization bears the imprint of
Marxism, the question he raised “How to respond to, how to feel
1
Dia Da Costa, “Sentimental Capitalism in Contemporary India: Art, Heritage and
Development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat,” Antipode 47-1 (2015): 74-97.
2
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 1920 essay reproduced in
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237868, Consulted January 29,
2016.
xiv
Introduction
responsible for a heritage that hands you down contradictory orders?”3 can
nevertheless be transposed to the postcolonial situation and studied in the
light of new vistas thus opened.
From the crossroads of diachronicity and synchronicity, tradition and
modernity, singularity and solidarity, here and elsewhere, repetition and
reinvention, the fifteen articles presented in the volume show how multiple
heritages are and were negotiated in the Indian subcontinent. Modernism
is a key concept that runs through many of them. The opening article
(Chapter 1) by the poet Debasish Lahiri draws on art history to appraise
modern Indian poetry written in English, as it emerged from cities like
Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi. Such an approach enables him to veer away
from the well-trodden paths of literary history and explore what he calls
the “siren limits” of Indian art and literature. Through the election of his
own, clearly specified heritage or canon, Keki N. Daruwalla, Nissim
Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar against the paintings of Vivan Sundaram,
Gangendranath Tagore, Jaminy Roy and Francis Newton Souza, Lahiri
offers a rare insight into the constant dialectic of the national and the
modern in Indian art and literature. With regard to the Indian novel in
English, the locus, at least initially, of the tension between modernism,
perceived as a Eurocentric enterprise, and tradition, preserved as a
repository of immutable cultural heritage, was not the city, which served
as “interface between the local and the global” as Lahiri points out4 but
was rather the small town, emblematized by Malgudi, the cultural space
imagined by R.K. Narayan. Ludmila Volná's study of four novels of R.K.
Narayan (Chapter 8) brings this out in very clear terms. Rada Iveković's
theoretical considerations (Chapter 15) stem from a broader scope, as she
retraces the quarrel between the ancient and the modern from a historical
and international perspective to show how gender becomes an
incontrovertible operator in the negotiation between heritage and rupture.
The interconnection and interdependence between the two concepts are
such that it is difficult to obtain a fine balance between them. In other
words, finding the centre, to borrow an image from V.S. Naipaul, is one of
the existential preoccupations of the postcolonial.
R. Azhagarasan's reading of the Tamil Buddhist epic Manimekalai
(Chapter 9) confirms Rada Ivekovic's findings about gender, in the sense
that it argues that the author Cattanar used the courtesan's female voice to
develop a polemic within Buddhism. Writing from the cross-roads of
3
Jacques Derrida, “Marx and Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on
Jacques Derrida's “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso,
1999), 219.
4
Debasish Lahiri, supra, 10.
Heritage and Ruptures in Indian Literature, Culture and Cinema
xv
literature and culture, R. Azhagarasan recalls the debate between Buddhist
heterodoxy and Brahmin orthodoxy in Tamil Nadu (from 3d to 19th
Centuries AD) and throws light on the contemporary debate on the situation
of the Dalits through this return to the classical but neglected epic. The
appropriation of Indian heritage by the Hastings circle in the form of
Orientalism is studied by Madhu Jain Benoit (Chapter 10). She argues that
while enabling India to lay claims to her ancient past by breaking down
Western neo-classical paradigms, the Hastings circle put India in a time
warp, owing to the colonial constructs which were emerging at that time.
Belkacem Belmekki highlights Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's endeavours to
promote peaceful relations between Hindus and Christians after the Sepoy
Mutiny in 1858 by invoking their common theological roots. Because he
was intimately convinced that such a rapprochement was indeed a political
necessity for the survival of the Muslims, Khan strove to make the common
heritage a shared one (Chapter 11). Shruti Das also refers to colonial history
in order to explain linguistic regionalism in contemporary Myanmar. Hers is
a short introduction to Myanmarese literature in English and Myanmarese
Literature translated into English (Chapter 12).
A number of articles in the volume focus on Bengal. Evelyne Hanquart
Turner's reading of the Forsterian intertext of Howard's End in Anuradha
Roy's An Atlas of Impossible Longing (Chapter 5) transposes Wilfred
Stone's question to the Bengali context: "Who shall inherit Bengal?" The
fact that a homeless orphan with tribal roots ends up as the beneficiary of
two estates in two opposite parts of Bengal at the conclusion of the novel
illustrates how the miracle of love makes justice prevail in a world of
capitalist greed. Geetha Ganapathy-Doré's exploration of family, geography
and ideology in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Low Land (Chapter 7) straddles the
Bengal of the 1970s when the Naxalbari revolt was challenging the
postcolonial government and the postideological America of the 1990s. She
identifies the moment of the transmission of property, whole or divided, to
be a crucial one which tests the endurance of family bonds. Her article
emphasizes the necessity of transgenerational solidarity for transnational
families to stand. Jitka de Préval takes up a classic of Indian cinema based
on Sarath Chandra Chatterjee's Bengali novel, i.e., Devas and interprets the
metamorphosis of the visual depiction of his character by different directors
as a reflection of the reshaping of the Indian man through the pressures of
colonization, independence, and globalization. Devdas thus becomes a sign
recording the progressive transformation of the Bengali into the globalized
Indian, in her view (Chapter 13).
The question of heritage and rupture is more acutely felt in diasporic
contexts. While the migrants try to retrieve the heritage through the revival
xvi
Introduction
of certain cultural practices or the reconstruction of ethnoscapes and by
returning to their origins, their children are lost between the culture
inherited from their parents and the culture of the host country in which
they are born and raised. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru sees a parallel
between the Kureishian hero's trajectory of healing and the liminal
multicultural space that London has become (Chapter 3). Celia Wallhead
adopts an object-oriented analysis of Kiran Desai's An Inheritance of Loss,
taking her clue from Henry James's idea of the solidity of specification,
Baudrillard's object systems and Bill Brown's thing theory (Chapter 2).
Ahmed Mulla examines the problematic of dual heritage in Jhumpa
Lahiri's novel The Namesake and her short story “Hema and Kaushik”
(Chapter 6). Lahiri's female protagonists are not passive receivers of an
inherited culture or puzzled onlookers of a foreign culture. They are, he
claims, better regarded as discerning and critical negotiators. He sees a
sense of mutuality at work in their cultural choices. Caroline Trech
analyzes the politics and aesthetics of British Asian heritage in two films
written by Ayub-Khan-Din East is East and West is West, directed
respectively by Damien O'Donnell and Andy De Emmony (Chapter 14).
Heritages are not always glorious. Is it possible to escape a shameful
and deadly legacy such as rape and incest? Does rupture in the form of
parricide mean definitive escape? Tina Harpin's comparative study
(Chapter 4) of Bitter Fruit, the novel of the South African writer Achmat
Dangor, and Cereus Blooms at Night by the Caribbean writer Shani
Mootoo shows how “transmission is complicated in a world of willing or
unwilling encounters and migrations.”5 The plant metaphors employed by
the authors in the titles leaves room to place one’s hopes for a possible
future in creolization, she concludes.
As Eugène Ionesco put it,
… in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living
moment of culture a ‘will to renewal.’ This is not the prerogative of the last
decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of ‘crises’, of rupture,
repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation,
petrification and death.6
Cornelius Crowley, Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Michel Naumann
Paris, 2016.
5
Tina Harpin, supra, 71.
Carol A. Dingle ed., Memorable Quotations: Jewish Writers of the Past (New
York: iUniverse Ink, 2003), unpaginated.
6
LITERATURE
CHAPTER ONE
IN THE CITY THEY COME AND GO:
DIALOGICAL MODERNISM IN INDIAN
ENGLISH POETRY
DEBASISH LAHIRI
A word is an unplumbable abyss. We can climb out or fall through, as
we wish. All the arbitrariness of spirit at its disposal we can neither
confine nor confirm. In this, as in many other things, it is like the city.
The city was born with a mark of shame on its crest, just like language,
Cain’s inheritance. The birth of this City of Man also brought forth an
attendant wariness and weariness about the populous and diverse nature of
life that had just come into being. This anxiety about a-priori-ness
manifested itself in the attempts made by St. Augustine and St. Jerome to
define, and thus if possible confine, this arbitrariness to two chosen sites:
the Wilderness and the City.
These were, of course, ideal cities and ideal wildernesses. With his ears
ringing from the banter of greed, the pell-mell of egos, eccentricities that
became normalized by their sheer multiplicity, demanding attention,
snarling disapproval at their disfavour at the hands of God’s orderly men,
Augustine framed his City of God. There all a-priori-ness would be
schooled, harmonized, and a trajectory marked, anticipating even
deviance.
Jerome, immured to the silence of the Syrian Desert or the cobbled
desolation of Bethlehem, attempted to define the Wilderness. He
substituted the opprobrious silence of the Wilderness that refused to be
recorded in sound, a hubbub that refused the music of laws, with the
ordered, repeated, and identifiable details of monastic life. Attempts at
harnessing the dangers posed by the Wilderness are in fact older than
Jerome’s. When Christ fasted in the Wilderness and prayed, it became
easier for the early Fathers of the Church to define the Wilderness as a
context to the contemplations of Christ. The lawless ground made sense of
and the Wilderness given a pattern and a confine, one could easily access
4
Chapter One
the eternity of Christ’s projections without the fear of either being cleaved
by their magnitude or winded by their variety. Such a noose of definition
had to be put around the wilderness. It was now ready to be relocated into
the city.
For Augustine, whose writings betray a deep distrust of the depravity
and lack of respect towards categories and orders in cities, Rome was both
the city of God and the city founded by a fratricide, like Cain. Incidentally
both his conceptions, that of Hell and Heaven, are urban in nature. There
is a great difference however. Whereas the city of God is governed by his
will, divided into orderly segments, regulated by continence and the fear
of limits set with rigour, the Other city is teeming, swarming with
multitudinous voices, desires and devices piled one upon the other,
heterogeneous and homogenous, overflowing like honeycombs whose
seals have come off. The Other city then sits on the edge of a chaos, tilts
towards it, and refuses any external will that seeks to control and codify its
shifting register of caprice, its creative potential. No wonder then that John
Milton had delved into his readings from Virgil’s Georgics to come up
with the image of Pandemonium, another city, in Paradise Lost as a place
of dizzying diversity of denizenship. Identities heels over head with each
other, each demanding attention, each prolonging the antithesis, delaying
even the possibility of synthesis. In fact, Milton finds this very “thickness”
a sign of their abjection and their lost purpose. Thick as autumnal leaves in
the stream, innumerable, like a “pitchy cloud”1 of swarming locusts, and
ultimately the Deluge: in forty odd lines in Book I Milton is at a loss to
respond to the vision that he has of Hell. His images are not an attempt to
portray the city of Pandemonium, but an attempt to dismiss it as
impossible. To be fallen is to be numberless.
The subdued wilderness, its radical randomness curbed, would serve
for Jerome as the model for the city. A brilliant rendition of this idea is to
be found in the fifteenth-century Neapolitan artist Niccolò Colantonio’s
painting St. Jerome and the Lion. Jerome’s room, arrayed with his
learning, his sense of order and humanity, and ultimately his obedience of
God, enforces upon the powerful animal the striations of humanity,
monastic severity, and Latin grammar. The lion is disciplined by Jerome’s
history. In the Enlightenment, the concept of time and its narratological
ramifications emerged in an age in which the citizens of Western
European nations internalized their own supervision. The disciplinary
1
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, line 340 (London: Penguin Books, 2003),
11.
Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry
5
methods established during this age reveal a linear time whose moments
are integrated, one upon another, and which is oriented towards a terminal,
stable point; in short, an evolutive time. This makes historical knowledge a
precondition for the accumulation of personal and social goods.
Heritage is the term that may be applied to this accumulated and still
accumulating stock of historical knowledge, to the myriad artifacts it has
produced down the ages, and now associated with the aesthetic spectacle
provided by the display and experience of it, in museums, archives,
schools, and syllabi.
Heritage is an iron-clad regime, a testament to the purges instituted by
the Past. It is an inheritance too that passes to those who survive its
previous, now departed, custodian. The very process of succession enables
its value and the interest in it to mature. The power to speak for the Past,
through an unchanged mode of address, is too tempting to let go,
especially in the world of art and literature.
On 19th July 1937, the National Socialist government of Germany
made a dramatic public attempt to define authoritatively the nature of
decadent art for the benefit of its citizens. This exhibition was called
Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), and was seen by over two million
visitors as it toured Germany and Austria over a period of three years. The
word “entartet” had been in use for several years and was semantically
implicated in the desire for racial as well as cultural purity that obsessed
the exhibition’s creators. It is, however, essentially a biological term,
defining a plant or animal that has so changed that it no longer belongs to
its species. By extension, it referred to art that is unclassifiable, or so far
beyond the confines of what is accepted that it is in essence ‘non-art’.
In the programme notes for this exhibition, the language itself grows
involved and breathless in trying to sum up the latent energy of the artists
brought together.
Constrained reality is split up and broken open to become a vessel for his
accumulated, burning, sensual passion, which, once inflamed, is oblivious
of all psychic depths and bursts out – consuming, expanding, copulating
with all its parts. There exist for him no resistance and no preordained
limits.2
2
Stephanie Barron, ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi
Germany (Los Angeles & New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art &
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991), 5.
6
Chapter One
This was art unbounded; the schools, their tired historical tyranny, their
political imperatives, had all been bypassed. Art that could not be tagged
and contained in its appointed locker was the stuff of nightmares for the
critical orthodoxy. A reality to which one would have to familiarize
oneself if one were to make sense of art in modern India, independent
India.
That returns me to my title, ab ovo. It derives from Indian painter
Vivan Sundaram’s iconic work People Come and Go (1981) (with obvious
echoes of Eliot’s lines from Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), which
brilliantly reflects the mood of translational cultural exchange prevalent in
post-independence Indian art and literature. The painting depicts a
gathering of artists, much like my prospective advocacy, and defence of
Indian artistic handy-dandy today. The alternative map of symptoms that I
have tried to draw, quite perfunctorily and very briefly, in all its religious
and secular caprices, signifying a clear European insecurity when
confronted with multiplicity, the worlding of inequality, and the logic of
myriadness, was in preparation of trying to define the attitudes, dominant
even in the art world, that led to modern Indian art and literature
(especially poetry) being consigned to a critical purgatory. Neither here
nor there, the sentence passed on Indian poetry has, however, only the skin
of purgatorial hope beneath which a misunderstood, suspicious spikiness
serrates like the finality of Limbo.
So, why use art-history to read Indian poetry in English? Art history, in
India, is a contradiction in terms. It is history in the sense of it being a
record of creativity; it is quite dismissive about a curatorial desire to
gather techniques, codes, and limits with the temporal injunction to
continue them. That is why I use it. I intend to escape the clutches of
literary history and its geographic, political, racial, and teleological
frameworks. Indian art and literature answers to a different call: I choose
to call it a siren-limit.
I intend to challenge the standard chronology and inbuilt routed-ness or
trajectory of the discourse of Indian literary Modernism by mingling the
‘birth’ of Modernist literary mores with the matrix of Modernist painting
and sculpture in India. Literature, especially that portion composed in
English, has too readily been studied in isolation from the breakthroughs
and realizations made in the medium of painting or sculpture in India. In
his poem “To Georges Braque: On his Painting “School Prints – The
Birds” Keki Daruwalla addresses the painter only to remind him about the
necessity to escape the strictures of schools and their laws:
Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry
7
Paint and flight have different laws/ When all that rigidity/ explodes
through the window/ of the painting/ into the sky/ imagine how the bird
will fly.3
2006 saw the publication of the Penguin Anthology of Decadent
Poetry, featuring the poetry of the British fin de siècle. Edited by Lisa
Rodensky, this volume lists Indian poet Sarojini Naidu besides such
“decadent” writers as Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The inclusion of Naidu’s “Indian Dancers” or
“To a Buddha seated on a Lotus” linked her poetry with the Decadent
Movement of the 1890s, which prescribed an anti-romantic belief in
original sin and nature, the presence of the grotesque, a particularly ornate,
perverse, and unnatural language, a tendency towards the hyperbolic, and
the easy use of religious mysticism. Naidu describes the dancers thus:
Now silent, now singing and swaying and swinging, like blossoms that
bend to the breezes or showers,
Now wantonly winding, they flash, now they falter, and, lingering,
languish in radiant choir;
Their jewel-girt arms and warm, wavering, lily-long fingers enchant
through melodious hours,
Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, what passionate bosoms
aflaming with fire!4
Naidu’s dancers pulsate with an insouciant life. Their forms and
movement elude and duck under the corralling noose of hermeneutics.
Naidu’s poetry was not the obedient wagon hitched to the engine of
British poetry, following its curves and bends with rigour. There was a
desire to establish a zone of translation in which the language of
contemporary art in the shape of the emergence of the Calcutta School (as
opposed to the Bengal School), the Delhi School of Art and the Baroda
Art Collective could be used to signify historical forms and contemporary
figures that had a local and regional resonance. This translational sense of
the many dimensions of ‘nationness’—rural, urban, symbolic, archival,
figurative—in Naidu’s The Golden Threshold, however, did not constitute
a mere nationalist agenda or aesthetic. This new emphasis on nationness,
seen as a drawback, marked as orientalist regression, actually made
3
Keki N. Daruwalla, “To Georges Braque” from “A Summer of Tigers,” in
Collected Poems 1970-2005 (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006), 249.
4
Sarojini Naidu, “Indian Dancers,” in Penguin Book of Decadent Poetry, ed. Lisa
Rodensky (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 213.
Chapter One
8
possible an open field of intercultural experimentation; and effectively
resisted cultural and territorial closure. This sense of the nation as a force
and a form of cultural mediation that emerged in the poetry of Naidu
reached out toward larger international or cosmopolitan perspectives.
Naidu’s Indianness is a paratactic one. I use Parataxis in this context to
signify an ensemble, out of the many one, or one that is made out of many.
Mirroring the grammatical/rhetorical device of throwing in parallel clauses
without any recourse to conjunctions, Naidu makes no attempt to harness
the teeming, multitudinous quality of urban living; she is not worried by
the collapse of laws or the flying by the nets of order and orthodoxy. The
cultures, colours, rites, and sounds of the extraordinary are taken with a
calm equanimity and a lackluster eye. In poems like the “Wandering
Beggars”, “The Palanquin Bearers”, “Ecstasy”, “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad”
and “Street Cries”, she presents the impecunious India, the languorous
India, the diligent India, the religious India, the sectarian India, the liberal
India, the sonorous and the silent India.
When dawn’s first cymbals beat upon the sky,
Rousing the world to labour’s various cry,
To tend the flock, to bind the mellowing grain,
From ardent toil to forge a little gain,
And fasting men go forth on hurrying feet,
Buy bread, buy bread, rings down the eager street. (“Street Cries”)5
What do you weave, O ye flower-girls
With tassels of azure and red?
Crowns for the brow of a bridegroom,
Chaplets to garland his bed.
Sheets of white blossoms new-garnered
To perfume the sleep of the dead. (“In the Bazaars of Hyderabad”)6
Naidu’s parataxis drew closely from the early experiments in painting
at the Tagore household at Jorasanko, near Calcutta. The indigenous
cubism of Gaganendranath, Rabindranath’s nephew, and the selfconscious primitivism of Sunayani Devi, his niece, affected Naidu deeply.
To consign Naidu’s poetry with Symons’s tired “Javanese Dancers”, thus,
is to proclaim with Auguste Rodin, (enthusiastically), the great
ethnographic benefit of the movements of the legs, arms, fingers, and
5
6
Ibid., 216.
Ibid., 217.
Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry
9
waists of Cambodian dancers when the thing in question was his vision of
Angkor. Interestingly, in contrast, the modernist Shiv K. Kumar, writes
about Hyderabad in terms of the colonial/occidental fear of pestilence in
the East, of multitudinousness, hodge-podge of categories, loss of
distinction and identity: in short, Hell or the Wilderness. In his poem
“General Ward: Osmania Hospital” he writes:
We forget that at sundown
we’d be led through a subway to a vault
where mummies lie, cheek by jowl,
dreaming of immortality7
This is decadence in all its fear of life, pulse, and promiscuity in India.
And yet Kumar is termed a modernist and Naidu condemned by the
egregious parameters of the Western Canon, malleable only to the dictate
of Western literary history. Should books of literary history then exit
through the window where an appraisal of the achievements and sheer
variety is concerned? No, perhaps not; it is not the Indian way. Perhaps it
will remain as a curiosity in the postmodern schema of multiple histories
and provide the laughs.
And he is not alone. The Keki Daruwalla we had seen raging against
the walls of art history closing in on the self-expression of the painter
resorts, in poems like “Pestilence” from his first collection Under Orion
(1970), to the same phobic reduction of Indian public life:
Pairs of padded feet
are behind me
astride me
in front of me
the footpaths are black feet
converging on the town
brown shoulders black shoulders
shoulders round as orbs
muscles smooth as river stones glisten
till a dry wind scourges
the sweat from off their backs8
Lines such as these could so easily have fitted into Lisa Rodensky’s
anthology. It goes to show the perils of doing literary history in the Indian
7
Shiv K. Kumar, “General Ward, Osmania Hospital,” in Thus Spake the Buddha
(New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 2002), 21.
8
Daruwalla, “Pestilence” from “Under Orion,” op.cit., 43.
10
Chapter One
context and the freedom poets like Daruwalla have fashioned for
themselves: like invoking the Victorian twilight in his mid-twentieth
century poem.
I return to the seed again and the gathering of artists in that room in
Viva Sundaram’s painting. It could very easily be deemed as the West’s
claustrophobia moment. Howard Hodgkin in his cane chair and Bhupen
Khakhar with a friend, sitting in comfortably Indian positions on a roomwide blue couch, silently admire a canvas whose frame is all we can see,
partially. A subtle reworking of Diego Velázquez’s painting Las
Meninas (1656), there is also Picasso’s masonic light-bulb from
Guernica (1937), whose iridescence almost singes Khakhar’s figure. In
addition to these incorporated details, there is a piling up of artistic
citations that give the hoar of art-history a nightmare ride. Khakhar’s
ironic primitivism, the strongly coloured, bold forms of Hodgkin’s semiabstracts, and Sundaram’s own mythic realism flow in and out of the
room. They brush up against various signatures of style, mode, and mood.
But here is no anxiety of influence, only a prevailing mood of translation
and conversation.
Modernism in English poetry written in urban India established a zone
of translation in which its language could signify historical forms and
contemporary figures that had a local or even regional significance. My
intention today is to look at the work of poets like Arun Kolatkar and
Nissim Ezekiel, and try to fathom the reasons behind the exfoliation of
city-poetry, or the poetry of place in cities further and beyond the original
colonial metropolis of Calcutta (Witness Hyderabad having Sarojini Naidu
and Shiv K. Kumar, and Delhi having Keki Daruwalla). The artmovements, both inside and outside the academic pales before and directly
after independence in 1947, would be instructive in this quest.
On 7th May the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore celebrated his 60th
birthday in Weimar, and used the opportunity to visit the Bauhaus, where
he found the teaching practices of Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, and
Georg Muche akin to his own radical educational experiments at Vishva
Bharati, the university he had founded at Shantiniketan. Two years
previously, he had appointed Stella Kramrisch to teach art history there;
now, at Tagore’s suggestion, a selection of Bauhaus works was shipped to
Calcutta to be exhibited, in December 1922, at the fourteenth annual
exhibition of the Society of Oriental Art, patronized by the Tagores.
Among the exhibits (which mysteriously never returned to Europe) were
two water-colours by Wassily Kandinsky, nine by Paul Klee, and a single
painting by the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis.
Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry
11
The exhibition was well received, but what was perhaps even more
important was that a number of Cubist paintings by Rabindranath’s
nephew, Gaganendranath Tagore, and folk-primitivist works by his niece
Sunayani Devi were also shown on this occasion. In earlier decades the
example and influence of the Tagores, particularly of Rabindranath’s other
nephew Abanindranath, had been linked to the Orientalism of the Bengal
School of Art, which drew upon Mughal and Rajput miniatures and
Japanese brush-and-ink techniques to create an anticolonial, ‘pan-Asian’
style of narrative painting, welcomed by bourgeois nationalists. By 1922,
however, Rabindranath himself appears to have moved away from the
Orientalism of the Bengal School, and to be seeking a new direction for
his art school at Shantiniketan. Even before the December exhibition, the
sociologist Benoy Sarkar, exposed to modernist art in Berlin and Paris,
had initiated a heated dispute in the Orientalist journal Rupam by urging
India’s artists to adopt the international avant-garde’s ‘aesthetics of
autonomy’ in accordance with their quest for political autonomy. In fact,
much of the cultural debate is carried out in journals such as Rupam,
Modern Review, Prabasi and Bharati. Sarkar and Kramrisch wrote
approvingly of Gaganendranath’s Cubist fantasies, and Kramrisch’s
careful critical evaluation of Sunayani’s work is still relevant. If we admit
the happy coincidence of the modernist moment with the year 1922, in
India as in Europe, it must be noted that it is not the influence of the
Bauhaus, but the experiments of Gaganendranath and Sunayani, that
initiate a modernist idiom.
Gaganendranath’s Cubism, harshly dismissed as trivial by the colonial
British critic W.G. Archer, must be seen as a radical liberation of narrative
art from naturalistic representation, substituting a dynamic, fluid,
mysterious play of light and shade and colour for the relatively static
geometry of Analytical Cubism. The titles of his works (The Poet on the
Island of the Birds, The House of Mystery, Aladdin and His Lamp, The
City of Dwaraka, The Seven Brothers Champa) suggest an imagination
steeped in literature and myth, and his experiments with reflected and
broken light create a haunting, fantastic world beyond naturalism, even
leading towards Expressionism, as the avant-garde critic Max Osborn
suggested in reviewing one of his paintings at an exhibition of modern
Indian art in Berlin in 1923.
But his Cubism had no immediate following, while his sister
Sunayani’s adoption of subjects and styles from folk art appears to have
been the first step in the constitution of an Indian primitivism. The
emergence of primitivism in Indian art may be linked with a number of
social and political phenomena: the transformation of elite nationalism
12
Chapter One
into a popular movement led by Mahatma Gandhi, the move towards
ruralism and environmentalism in the social philosophies of both Gandhi
and Tagore, and the admiration of nationalists, including painters of the
Bengal School, for the bold simplicity of folk painting, notably that of the
Kalighat patuas, popular artists associated with the area around the Kali
Temple in Calcutta.
The discourse of modernism in Indian art is marked by a constant
dialectic of the national and the modern; the well-documented ‘turn’
towards folk art, the representation of village life, and the environmental
primitivism of the period are collectively a form of nationalism at odds, in
some ways, with the internationalism of modernist aesthetics. At the same
time, there are interesting congruities with modernisms elsewhere, and,
among artists themselves, both an awareness of the European avant-garde
and a sense of the need to resist, not just its implicitly imperialist cultural
norms, but also the totalizing ideology of bourgeois nationalism. This
might sometimes be achieved by a recourse to formalism, while at other
times the value of the local ‘tradition’ might be asserted. It is thus that
modernism has no firm canonical position in India. It has a paradoxical
value involving a continual double-take. Sometimes it serves to make
indigenist issues and motifs progressive; sometimes it seems to subvert
tradition. Thus, paradoxically placed, modernism in India does not invite
the same kind of periodization as in the west.
This is a valuable reminder, but it is worth recording some features of a
temporal history. Sunayani Devi’s use of folk motifs and styles arises
partly from her exposure to them as a woman in the inner quarters of the
family house, though she absorbed an eclectic mix of influences, from
Ravi Varma to the Bengal School. At the same time, she reproduces the
aristocratic–folk paradigm of her uncle Rabindranath Tagore’s
experiments at Shantiniketan. But her distinctive personal vision
influenced the work of Jamini Roy, the most notable painter in the next
decades to use the folk idiom for modernist expression. Roy’s primitivism
involved a deliberate formal simplification, accomplished by an
extraordinary mastery of line. There is a ruthless elimination of detail that
enables him to achieve a remarkable modernist brevity, but this is not a
pure formalism; it is an art that criticizes colonial urban culture through a
radical valorization of the local and the communitarian.
The emergence of modernism in India in the 1950s and 1960s was a
time of experimentalism for the Bombay poets. The hybrid transactions
that took place between translation and creative writing, between English
and other Indian languages, not only expose the simultaneous confluence
of local and world literature, but also propose a form of belonging as a
Dialogical Modernism in Indian English Poetry
13
defiant all-inclusive category, an open-ended process of translation where
origins become irrelevant.
In India, cosmopolitan colonial cities like Bombay or Calcutta
constitute the interface between the local and the global. In his seminal
book The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-garde, the
art historian Partha Mitter proposes the concept of “virtual cosmopolis”9 to
explain the critical engagement of the urban intelligentsia with modernity
in colonial cities where these interactions were largely negotiated through
the printed medium, but also through English, the global language, as it
were. Mass migration is obviously another factor that shapes cultural
globalization. If metropolises constitute the interface between the local and
the global and represent places of formidable tension and contiguities, it is
also because they are peopled by migrants and diasporic minorities who
represent the most tangible and proximate presence of the global or
transnational world as it exists within ‘national’ societies. Migrants also
negotiate between plural belongings and cultural traditions, without taking
root in a single identity, while forging transnational affiliations across the
global/local divide.
Bombay was precisely such a place of cosmopolitanism. It was indeed
primarily forged through the printed medium since after the Second World
War, books from all over the world literally started pouring onto the
pavements, through English, which acted as a window to global literatures
and international modernism, but also through migration and interaction
with people from all origins, languages, and cultures.
The poet Dilip Chitre, writing about himself and the other MarathiEnglish poet Arun Kolatkar, recorded how Mumbai (then still Bombay for
English speakers) had liberated them, while also declaring that both their
works were rooted in the maddening cosmopolitan mix of Mumbai.
Bombay is certainly the most composite, multilingual, and multiconfessional of Indian cities, where Portuguese, British, Jews, Parsis,
Iraqis, Russians, Chinese, Persians, but also Indians and refugees from the
whole sub-continent, congregated and left their mark.
Most “Bombay” poets were not originally from the city and had
precisely migrated there, uprooted from other states, small cities, or rural
backgrounds (Dilip Chitre came from Gujarat, Arun Kolatkar from
Kolhapur, a small town in South Maharashtra, etc.). When they were born
or brought up in Bombay, they often came from religious minorities who,
9
Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde
(London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 11.
14
Chapter One
at one point in time, also found refuge in the city, like Adil Jussawalla and
Gieve Patel who were Parsi, or Nissim Ezekiel who was Jewish. During
the 1940s and 1950s, the city also represented a kind of haven for
European war émigrés who often played a seminal role, especially in the
visual arts, in mediating the international avant-garde and fostering
modernism. The Progressive Artists’ Group, which is the most influential
school of modern art in India and was formed in 1947 in Bombay, is
precisely a product of such migrations and cosmopolitanism. Not only
were Jewish European émigrés largely involved in the development of the
Progressive Artists’ Group (like the German cartoonist Rudi Von Leyden
or the Austrian painter Walter Langhammer, who became the first arts
director of the Times of India), but the founding fathers of this group all
come from different regional, religious, and linguistic backgrounds: F.N.
Souza from Goa, K.H. Ara from Hyderabad, M.F. Husain from
Pandharpur in Maharashtra, S.H. Raza from Madhya Pradesh, Sadanand
Bakre from Baroda. When many modern Indian poets started writing in
the 1950s and 1960s, it was the time for Beat poetry, sound poetry, visual
poetry, concrete poetry, jazz poetry, and continuing surrealism; a time of
openness to everything else that was happening in the world and of
feverish experimentation with all kinds of forms and mediums. Bombay
poets engaged with these new paradigms and with the internationalism of
the avant-garde. They had all been exposed to the “modernist” galaxy and
often consciously placed themselves in this lineage.
This period, which is sometimes described as a kind of “Indian
renaissance”, signalled years of collective endeavours. The poets often
formed small alternative presses and workshops, countless journals and
underground anti-establishment little magazines, like the cyclostyled
Shabda (literally “word” or “sound”) in Marathi started by Dilip Chitre,
Arun Kolatkar and others in 1954 or Damn You: A Magazine of the Arts,
started in 1965 by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and modelled on the
American publication Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, which rapidly
became a temporary outpost of the American and European avant-garde.
This renaissance affected all artistic domains. We thus find in the
1950s and 1960s in Bombay the same creative symbiosis between the
visual arts and literature that is a trademark of Euro-American modernism.
The metropolitan flirtations between artistic subcultures and the way
Bombay poet-critics like Nissim Ezekiel, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Adil
Jussawalla and Gieve Patel poached and encroached upon the territory of
painters is a feature of the times. Many of the journals and little magazines
published at the time are meticulously crafted and designed works of art,
edited together by painters and poets (Vrischik edited by the painters