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Respondant: Jane Newman, Comparative Literature link to faculty profile
Moderator: Wendy Piquemal
"Nirala’s Pasts and a Romantic Sense of the Colonial Present"
Bali Sahota, University of Minnesota
It is perhaps axiomatic now that the historical imagination involves a construction of the present as much as it does a past. A firm sense of the present is at once a result of grappling with a past as it is the initial basis upon which that past can be apprehended as such. A particularly acute sense of the present – especially what is construed as eternal within it – can arise only through an attempt to distinguish, imagine and reconstruct historical pasts.
This paper attempts to distinguish the particular sensibility of a present that arose in Hindi Romanticism by looking at its presentation of the past. The paper concentrates on the work of the famous Hindi romantic poet Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' (1899-1961), one of the prominent members of the Chayavad literary circle in the interwar years. I examine especially the works that deal with historical and legendary figures such as Maharana Pratap (The Rajput Ruler Pratap), Bhishm, and Bhakt Prahalad (The Devotee Prahalad) in conjunction with the essays on literary modernity such as "Navin Sahitya aur Pracin Vicar" (New Literature and Old Ideas) or "Navin Kavya" (New Poetry). In doing so, the aim is to better gauge the value that ‘Nirala’ assigns to epic motifs (in works such as Mahabharat, Ramayan ki Antarkathaen (The Internal Tales of the Ramayana) and "Ram ki Shakti Puja” (“Rama’s Worship of the Godess Shakti”) for the present. By looking at the sense of the present that emerges from ‘Nirala’'s Romantic conjuring of the Indian past, it is possible to arrive at the particular temporality of the epic in Hindi Romanticism. The paper will conclude by suggesting the relations this temporality has to the politics of late colonial India.
Although Romanticism (Chayavad) in Hindi was considered and even accused for being apolitical in its general themes and forms, I will demonstrate in the conclusion how political trends at the threshold of Partition actually led to a politicization of Romantic forms of thought. Chayavad had articulated notions of tradition and culture that were supposed to be beyond the mundane realm of politics. Yet at the end of Empire, different political constituencies became increasingly invested in searching out the sovereign principles that would define the post-imperial polity. It is through an examination of this turn of events in late colonial India that one can see what socio-political significance the articulation of the present – more specifically, a certain timelessness within the present – had attained through aesthetic elaboration and elucidation in Hindi Romanticism. This notion of the present allowed for the politicization of sensibility and aesthetics, construed widely, with far-reaching consequences.
States of Discontent: Ashis Nandy and Indian Experiences of Modernity
Christine Deftereos, University of Melbourne
This paper explores ‘states’ of sentiment including the dissonance, discontent, violence and uprooted ness characterizing experiences of Modernity, as depicted within the work of the Indian political psychologist and public intellectual Ashis Nandy. As a critical theorist interested in the dissonance that modern life produces, I will argue that his work enters into an interesting dialogue and negotiation with not only ‘states’ of sentiment but also with ‘the Modern Indian Nation State.’ For Nandy the political culture of the Modern Indian Secular Nation State, particularly during the last thirty years has perpetuated and sustained these ‘states’ of dissonance, discontent, violence and uprooted ness in particular ways. And it is largely through a discussion of Nandy’s critique of Secularism that I will explore this problematic.
This paper then seeks to consider notions of the ‘political’ not through the language of Realpolitik but through questions of subjectivity and subjective processes. I will argue that Nandy’s work invites us to question the human condition within Modernity and the subjective and inter-subjective processes which define this terrain. In doing so he engages in the broader debates of third generation critical theorists’ focusing on what is referred to as the pathologies within Modern Societies, though namely within the Indian context. These pathologies such as sectarian strife, communal and ethnic violence, corruption and increasing acts of terrorism are symptomatically expressed in the dislocation and dissonance underpinning the experience of Modernity or what in post-Adorno terms is also referred to as contingency.
This paper discusses Modernity in India as a symptom of a cultural encounter which represents an epistemic, cognitive, social and political disjuncture between traditional and modern systems of living and being. Within Nandy’s own writings this is largely characterized as a form of psycho-social displacement and never far from his considerations are Modernity’s pathologies, and its disruptive, corrosive and violent effects on subjectivity and subjective processes. Processes of modernization and modern political cultures continue to contribute to a fragmented and dislocated sense of Indian Selfhood, though Nandy also recognizes this condition in other societies. There is an uprooted ness which accompanies Modernity in India which has radically undermined pluralized ways of being and multiple knowledge systems, namely pre-modern cultures. This further disconnects people from integrated communities, traditions and cultural practices which for Nandy embody the pluralism of traditional knowledge systems, ways of being and ways of living which have contributed over the years to the resilience and cultural survival of the Indian civilization.
And it is largely this very search for a collective cultural rooted ness, imbedded ness or integration including a degree of psychological integration, that is to say ‘alternatives states’ that arguably Nandy’s critique invites us to consider. This paper therefore not only engages with Nandy’s critique of Modernity via his position on Secularism but also draws attention to alternative futures or ‘future states’ of possibilities within his work. Futures which for Nandy are plural, which recognize the humane within the political, and which speak the experiences of peoples in Postcolonial ‘States’ and Societies.
Global Visions or the Business of Culture: The Internet Industry in Salman Rushdie’s Fury
Ana Mendes, University of Lisbon
This paper finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's mid-20 th century critique of The Culture Industry and tries to chart the complex, ambivalent and contested nature of the cultural industries (Hesmondhalgh 2002), in particular the internet industry, in Salman Rushdie's Fury (2001). The novel's protagonist, Malik Solanka, a doll-making ex-Cambridge history professor, arrives in New York to find a release from a cataleptic rage that grips him. He is desperate to start over again, to erase his past or revise his "back-story" (Rushdie 2001, 50) by reinventing himself, and the city seems most suitable for such purposes: there "everybody who needed ... found ... home away from home among other wanderers who needed exactly the same thing: a haven in which to spread their wings" (Rushdie 2001, 157). It is an "unselfing of the self" (Rushdie 2001, 80) that Solanka desperately looks for, falling for the rhetoric of the American Dream of self-fulfilment and control over destiny and, somewhere on his way, also for one of its contemporary cultural practices: the internet. By the name of Professor Akasz Kronos, the protagonist embarks on a cyber venture as a curative for his anxieties, creating a doll-world in the imaginary planet Galileo-1 – the civilization of the Rijk or "The world of 'Puppet Kings'" (Rushdie 2001, 170) – that backfires on the "real" as the dolls intervene in the public affairs of actually existing Earth. Later on, his dolls are adopted as personae by revolutionary forces on an island named "Lilliput-Blefescu" (based on Fiji according to critics) and eventually become hip cultural products, inspiring a theme park and a Las Vegas entertainment centre and casino. In the end, Rijk is reduced to a mass-produced commodity, its survival dependent on the conditions of the cultural industries. Rushdie writes, "Life is fury. Fury – sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal – drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths" (Rushdie 2001, 20). Does Solanka's fury allow for renewed forms of subjectivity, collectivity, or globality? Or does it underscore the shortcomings of postcolonial ambiguities in the negotiations of neocolonial enterprises? I will try to elucidate these questions by focusing on the internet industry, while aiming to interrogate "whether we should think of the new state of play in the cultural industries, internationally, as a new stage of cultural imperialism, or as a sign of a new global interconnectedness with democratising possibilities" (Hesmondhalgh 2002, 10).
The central concern of this paper is basically to highlight Fury as an exploration of postcolonial spatial and political relationships in the context of globalised multinational corporations. It proposes to address the transforming value of Solanka's fury and the protagonist's negotiations of current global power structures, based on the assumption that a text so saturated with ambivalence may disclose the ways in which the fury of a postcolonial subject might challenge the democratizing rhetoric of the new global/information age. Can this ambivalence translate into subversiveness?