Book review: Francesca Orsini,East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature

Lighting up the ‘local cosmopolitans’ (p. 116) obscured by the agents of world literature, Orsini’s latest publication carves out the multilingual historicity of the region East of Delhi, ‘the ancient Kosala capital of Ayodhya, which became known as Awadh in Persian sources, and Oudh in British colonial ones’ (p. 9). The book demonstrates that North Indian society has long been multilingual and that colonial knowledge systems segregated languages such as Avadhi, Braj Bhasha, Urdu, Hindi and Persian on the basis of religious identity of the respective author. Orsini argues that ‘[f]or Orientalists and colonial administrators, religion (alongside caste) was the fundamental category of identity in South Asia’ (p. 2).

While several earlier scholars have argued against aligning language with religion (Busch, 2011; Hawley, 2009; Snell, 1991), Orsini’s selection of texts, places and authors, and their chronological arrangement, makes her approach and methodology of analysis, which combines archival research and fieldwork, worthy of attention. Downplaying the neat categories of ‘colonial modernity’ (p. 2) that seek to align a composition in a particular language with the religious identity of the author (p. 3), Orsini examines a corpus of different works, such as premākhyāns, prabandhakāvyās, kathās and tazkirās, to position them against a normative emphasis on the monolingual enterprise of nationalist ideologies, situating them within a multilingual paradigm.

Chapter 1 questions the ‘technologies of recognition’ (p. 4) that ignore the literary oeuvre of the authors of the opposite religion. Orsini contends that literary histories ‘typically focus on only one language and on what people wrote in that language, and primarily on “great works” or literary innovations’ (p. 7). What remains disappointing, therefore, are the unexplored aspects of the influence of languages in which these authors spoke, sang, read or studied. Orsini’s quest, therefore, is to capture the transmission of literary cultures which ensured the coexistence of various languages in a text, sometimes almost in a continuum of one another (p. 7).

Chapter 2 adopts a nuanced approach to highlight several concerns over examining such diverse texts in a multilingual culture. Orsini examines Avadhi premākhyāns, metaphorical stories regarding the love of God, written by Sufis (p. 25) from the fourteenth century, their seventeenth-century counterparts, a devotional kathā (Rāmcharitmānas) and two translations of the Indian Sufi poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmāvat by Persian translators. While looking for traces of Hindu and Muslim traditions, Orsini also discusses the circulation of these texts. For instance, Da’ud’s Chanāyan of 1379 established the genre of Avadhi folk romances in South Asia (p. 28). Chandāyan weaves oral folk traditions and motifs followed in Bārahmāsā poems of longing and desire by women for the absent lover/husband (Orsini, 2010: 147), through a mixture of Apabhrams´a and Persian. Other vernacular Sufi premākhyāns made perceptible references to the Rāmāyana and Māhābhārata as well (p. 35). This confirms the existence of a linguistic space that is not marked by strict boundaries, but it also allows authors to navigate the rich ecology of different cultural and religious traditions and patterns to produce their respective texts.

Celebrating the resulting diversity of literature that originated within the Indian subcontinent, Orsini thus makes a careful selection of texts to show how they embed concepts popular in both Hinduism and Islam. Her work remains influenced by theorist G.N. Devy (1992, 1999), who demonstrates how multilingualism is inherent in the Indian subcontinent. The memorable example of this remains the Indian vegetable seller who, as part of his trading strategy, speaks several languages, even though he is sometimes not literate in any of them. It is this notion of learning a language actively, by hearing it and picking up relevant words, that guides Orsini’s analysis of written text.

Chapter 3 situates poetry by Sants, devout and enlightened persons, at the interstices of caste, locality and religion. Aware of the works of well-known Sants such as Kabir and Raidas (p. 78), Orsini focuses on Gulal (sixteenth century) and Paltudas and Malukdas from the seventeenth century. Examining their poetry about caste and ephemerality, Orsini shows how the works of these poets on the margins (p. 78) were integral to Sant literature, which rests in the domain of orality. Highlighting this, Orsini makes an important contribution to the ongoing discourse debating this (Pollock, 1998, 2006), prizing both textuality and orality as ‘texts’ (p. 80).

In Chapter 4, Orsini discusses tazkirās, the genre of reminiscences and biographical notes, including the works of many Muslim poets who used multilingualism as part of their linguistic enterprise. She shows the neglect in mentioning Hindi works by Muslim poets by the authors of tazkirās. A similar pattern is evident in Hindi archives, which provide little information about Hindu poets who wrote their work in Persian (p. 130). In reality, Orsini argues, ‘the Hindu Persian poets praised the holy sites of Islam or used Islamic and Persian metaphors to talk about Hindu holy sites’ (p. 145). Moreover, she highlights that the growing prominence of Urdu in Lucknow in the eighteenth century almost erased these multilingual patterns (p. 148), as Urdu itself as a language used so many words from different sources.

Chapter 5 analyses the increased alignment of the authenticity of a work with the religion of its author as an impact of colonisation. The full reality, however, was that vernacular works proliferated in various Indian languages, including Braj Bhasha also in the twentieth century, and writers such as Premchand were translating Russian and French works, too.

Orsini’s new book contributes to a crucial debate around the monolingual ethos ascribed to Indian literature, especially in the domain where an understanding of Indian literature converges with the author’s religion (pp. 2, 81). This study builds on previous work (Orsini, 2012; Orsini & Sheikh, 2014), arguing how Jayasi’s Padmāvat of 1540 was not seen as part of Urdu literary history because of its Indic vocabulary, while simultaneously many Sufi writers were perceived to be too ‘Islamic’ to form part of Hindi literary archives.

The book makes important interventions about the politics of how literary discourses evolve. Orsini coins the term ‘absent presence’ (p. 1) to indicate how the inherent presence and value of multilingualism in the Indian subcontinent has been overlooked in prominent earlier literary critiques. Likewise, Orsini’s decision to select for her book the texts of lesser-known authors to make her argument about literary cultures remains noteworthy. While the book’s main audience will be scholars of literature, readers with an interest in linguistics and political sciences may also find this book useful, as language issues continue to remain prominent everywhere in South Asia.