Book review: Preetha Mani,The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender,Genre,and Comparative Method

Enlisted as part of a series that is devoted to the interdisciplinary study of literature, its cultural impact and its current critical and political implications, Mani’s book focuses on the literary traditions of Hindi and Tamil short stories beginning in the late colonial period in India and examines how they contribute to our understanding of Indian literature today. Spread over five chapters, Mani examines the literary choices made by Hindi and Tamil short story writers and the thematic conundrums they tackled through a socio-historical contextual analysis.

The book’s introduction contextualises the development of regional literature in India and highlights two processes of linguistic interactions that occurred during the colonial period, which, Mani contends, shaped regional Indian languages. The first process that Mani describes as ‘a new vernacularisation’ (p. 7) occurred during the early and mid-colonial period when regional Indian languages underwent changes in relation to English. These were unlike the changes that had occurred centuries earlier in relation to Sanskrit. The second process is the late colonial discourse that churned out cultural identities tied in myriad ways to the politics of regional languages, which became especially evident in confrontation with the question of a national language (p. 11). Suggesting that an idea of Indian literature (pp. 4–11) fortuitously emerged out of these dual linguistic processes, Mani draws on the parallel cases of Hindi and Tamil short stories, authors of which worked despite and often in reaction to the distinct politicisation of each. Even as these authors doubled down on the usage of regional language, they set their sights beyond the parochial sensibilities and in dialogue with the aesthetic and formal practices emerging from literary modernism across the world. The idea of Indian literature that emerged was a utopian realm, separate from that of the language in which authors could insert cosmopolitan sensibilities while exploring regional subjects (p. 16). With each subsequent chapter Mani presents the authors’ attempts to inhabit the ‘aftermath of the vernacular’ (p. 19). Although relegated to a lower tier in comparison with the novel in the West, Mani chooses to analyse short stories, as this was the genre chiefly deployed by the authors of the subcontinent to contend with the conditions of modernity, the trauma of the partition, and the postcolonial order (p. 23).

In Chapter 1, Mani expounds upon her methodological approach in the context of three distinct Indian literary currents of the 1930s. These involve the All-India Progressive Writers Association (PWA) formed in London, writing in Indian English, Premchand, writing in Hindi and Urdu, and Tamil writers grouped around the publication. Advocating a ‘multiscalar approach’ (p. 34), Mani draws our attention to the varied processes of worlding, that move beyond the translation-oriented approach to canonisation (pp. 34–8) that dominates current scholarship. Mani distinguishes her conception of worlding from other scholars, such as Djelal Kadir, Pheng Cheah, Gayatri Spivak, while also revisiting Heidegger’s (1936) initial theorising of worlding and underscores its inherent violence. Mani, however, does not emphasise a singular critique of Western-dominated scholarship of worlding; nor is it, she argues, solely applicable to the violence inflicted upon the ‘Third World subjects’ (pp. 40–1). Following this methodological approach, Mani leads us to the conclusion that just as only certain texts are offered a global visibility, even within a regional focus, only selective texts are offered a canonical status and the processes of how that happens also merits scholarly attention (p. 41).

To make her case Mani looks at the comparative worlding envisioned by Indian writers who were actively worlding Indian literature in Indian English, Hindustani, Hindi and Tamil, even as they traversed complex negotiations with the role and functions of translation. While the PWA writers coming together in London from diverse regional backgrounds presupposed translatability to contribute towards a global anti-fascist and anti-capitalist struggle, Premchand prioritised the building of a strong national canon of Hindi literature worthy of readership on its own terms as with English, French and Russian literature. The Manikkoti writers sought to counter-balance the narrowing influence of the Dravidian Self-Respect Movement and Pure Tamil Movement on the Tamil language by opening the literary landscape through a colloquialised Tamil, inclusive of Sanskrit and English influences (p. 61). The analysis of these comparative worldings sets the stage for subsequent chapters of the book that look at the facets of the Hindi and Tamil short story traditions as they evolved from these currents while acknowledging these pre-independence authors as their literary forbearers.

Chapter 2 builds on a comparison of Premchand’s literary philosophy of idealistic realism (adarsommukhi yatharthvad) constituting realistic depictions but inspiring readers towards open-ended progressivism (pp. 68–73), and Pudumaippittan’s aesthetic of isolation (tanimai; pp. 73–6). Mani demonstrates how the short stories of both authors grappled with the unfamiliar landscape of new womanhood and changing heterosexual dynamics. The brevity of the genre depicted the unsettled emotional turmoil caused by changing gender relations, even as it critiqued social realities albeit with differing hopes for progress. The pressures of genre and the conundrums of gender parallelly fomented possibilities of new literary modes for the later generation of writers.

Chapter 3 describes the post-independence landscape, which forced Hindi writers who were part of the nayi kahani movement and Tamil writers of Eluttu and other little magazines to forge literary histories that reconciled the disparate realist and modernist modes of writing. Distinguishing modes of writing from form (such as short story, novel, etc.), Mani emphasises these works as rhetorical devices with a shared intelligibility to position characters and authors to the readers (p. 98). Citing critical writing and unpublished correspondence between nayi kahani and Eluttu’s writers with the Sahitya Akademi’s journal Indian Literature, Mani demonstrates the alternative inheritances claimed by these writers to counter Sahitya Akademi’s nation-building priorities. From these attempts also emerged a universalising impulse to absorb within the storytelling of middle-class experience a broad spectrum of fissures along the lines of caste, communalism and gender.

The fourth chapter uncovers the echoes of these fault lines within the works of mostly Hindu Savarna writers through an analysis of the symbolic or linguistic designs employed by them to allude to the deep divides. Forming empathetic alliances between the readers and the characters was a central feature of these works. Elaborating on her readings of Mohan Rakesh and D. Jayakanthan, Mani presents a literary landscape where the anxieties of communal and caste tensions are played out on the field of modern woman’s mysterious desires. Mani devotes her final chapter to the women writers’ claim to the ‘literary’, rights to authorship and their positioning to avoid being labelled as ‘women writers’ (p. 185). It is especially in these final two chapters that Mani’s multiscalar comparative approach helps us identify the paradox of Indian literature. This multifaceted investigation helps untangle the humanistic, universalist idea of Indian literature that the writers aspired to and sought to create while entering into complex negotiations with caste, class, gender and linguistic identities. The present book is of interest to not only scholars of South Asian literature, particularly Hindi and Tamil, but also to scholars of comparative methodologies.