Dialectics of defeat : the problems of culture in postcolonial India 9788170462798, 8170462797

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DIALECTIC S OF DEFEAT T H E PROBLEMS OF CULTURE IN P O S T C O L O N I A L I N D I A

G. P. DESHPANDE

B O O II t

c a l c u t t a 2 00 6

Os O ¥ lcA

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-200 (,

© This collection Seagull Books 2006

Cover photograph by Naveen Kishore Cover design by Sunandini Baneijee

ISBN 81 7046 279 7

Published by Naveen Kishore, Seagull Books Private Limited 26 Circus Avenue, Calcutta 700 017, India Printed in India by Rockwel Offset 55B Mirza Ghalib Street, Calcutta 700 016

For

Janantarasauhridani (to borrow Kalidasa’s fam ous expression)

of this life and perhaps the next

C ontents

Preface The Indian Artist and the ‘Long Revolution'

ix 1

Dialectics o f Defeat: Some Reflections on Literature, Theatre an d Music in Colonial India

11

T h e Kingdome o f Darkness’ or the Problem of C ulture

37

The O rdinary and the Extraordinary in Creativity

48

Cultures o f Tolerance

62

Notes Towards a Re-reading o f the Natyashaslm

72

Europe an d O u r T heatre

87

Asia as W estern D om inance

96

History, Politics and the M odern Playwright

102

An Affair to R em em ber

111

The Text and the Play

117

P refa ce T h e lectures and essays collected in this volume have been pro­ d u c e d over a long period o f time. Some o f them were written in response to political and cultural developments. I discovered that n o t all of them were entirely comments on the situations or events h e re and now. A num ber of them concerned themselves with the historical experience o f the Indian writer and playwright, writing especially in Indian languages. It seems to me that o u r m edia and a section of the urban public do n o t avowedly concern them ­ selves with native cultural expression. Understandably, the prob­ lem s of o u r literary culture do n o t usually get the attention they deserve. A num ber o f writings in this collection address them ­ selves to those problems. This effort to come to term s with our culture has, o f course, b e e n rather sporadic. T here is no pretension here to an academ­ ic analysis and the approach has been quite eclectic. T he reader will find here a magician’s bag, as it were. The writing clearly lacks discipline but that has hopefully been com pensated for by what I m ight call radical eclecticism. You will find several things from Buddhism to the Enlightenm ent project in this writing. T he Indian writer writing in Marathi, Tamil, Bangla or any Indian language stands on a bridge between India and Europe. However, he stands there all alone. European debates have left m ost of Asia or the erstwhile colonized world far behind. It does

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not seem as if Algeria or francophone Africa matters to France in any significant way any longer. In that regard, Camus or Lyotard must be the last Algerians or French Algerians. T here were never any British Indians in that sense. But there was, at least, an aware­ ness of the mosaic that India happens to be. Now it is a different story. India figures in the English consciousness, if at all, as an undifferentiated ethnic reality. A real India has been replaced by an undifferentiated and therefore an im aginary India. This India is m ore unreal than Max M ueller’s o r M onier Williams’s India. Normally it would not or should not have m attered. But it does. Because the W'est decides the param eters o f o u r self-discovery. One need not grudge the status of the West. At least I d o n ’t. At the same time it is necessary to see that if our plural and varied cultural memory is not recognized for what it is, we shall have no intellectual or literary strategies to turn this cultural mem ory into cultural nationalism. We seem to have two views of India. T he West and the Westinfluenced Indian elite would take the simple way out by accept­ ing the easy formulation of one, undifferentiated India. The Indian nationalist, on the o th er hand, would advocate another equally undifferentiated India. T he difference is that the former approach takes the English-speaking (and largely uncontam inat­ ed by the vernacular) Indian and his understanding of India as constitutive of this mythical ‘one India’. The other approach con­ sists o f an Orientalist understanding o f the same. It also—and for that very reason—denies the cultural and literary plurality of India. This is n o t a case of am nesia, as m ore than one analyst has suggested. Rather, it is a m anufactured m em ory that celebrates the non-existent. If one were to look at our media and its coverage of our cultures and literatures, we would notice that, increasingly, it is incapable of handling Indian cultures. The media, therefore, manufactures a cultural reality which pushes the multiplicity of

preface / xi

our cultural experience under the rug. It is a simplified reality, indeed two kinds of simplified reality. These essays at one level join issue with that simplified version o f (or m anufactured) India. This book is an attem pt at working out a dialectic of defeat. T he crucial thing is the rupture that the colonial experience brought about in our lives. The present crisis can be understood only in those terms. For, both the versions of India have been the products of that phenom enon. The colonial experience makes m odernity and revivalism each o th er’s cousin, in a m anner of speaking! These essays are an exploration o f that phenom enon. They do not show a way out o f our cultural crisis but, hopefully look at that crisis in a clear m anner and, in the process, identify som e o f its features. T here are many friends who encouraged me to write these essays who are too num erous to m ention here. They naturally do n o t agree with all my prognostications. But they have been kind enough to keep me in this business, forever encouraging me to take the kind of positions that I have. Almost every one of these essays has been written because some friend or the other insisted th a t I must. I can only hope that in this collected form these essays read well and—m ore im portandy—make a point. G . P. D e s h p a n d e

Th e I n d i a n A r t i s t a n d the ‘ L o n g R e v o l u t i o n The moment the arts and commerce penetrate into the lives of the ‘people’ and create new means of riches, which gives strength to the labour class, it prepares itself for the revolution. —Barnave, Introduction à la Revolution Française, written in 1792, published in 18341

T here has always been an image o f Indian arts and crafts which is n o t so much unreal as it is a motivated structuring o f the Indian reality. This image, an extension of the notions of ‘Orientalism’ developed by colonizing Europe, also came to to be shared by the Indian elite over the nearly two hundred and fifty years o f contact with the colonizing West. In this image, the arts were looked upon as a form of shining mystique; inexplicable and immutable art form s that had to be and were received with rapturous welcome. It was the same with Indian philosophy. The ideals o f the Upanishads need ed and have always got an European interpreter in every cen­ tu ry since the eighteenth. Yeats’s enthusiasm for Rabindranath T agore’s philosophy-poetry was but one example o f how Indian arts a n d spiritualism have been a part o f the Western search for the O riental spirit—for those indescribable art forms and structures w hich are, stricdy speaking, beyond m odem aesthetics. Indian art provided yet another evidence o f the correctness of the ‘ontological a n d epistemological’ distinction between the ‘O rient’ and the ‘Occident*.2 It was true of literature, it was true of philosophy, it was tr u e also of music. How does one explain otherwise the ‘melodic a rts ’, so to speak, beginning in Japan and ending up somewhere on th e eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean? The O rient was mystical. It was good and right that it was so.

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The Indian elite, particularly since Independence, has swallowed the ‘mystique of the O rient’ theory. T hroughout the p ast few decades, a strange revivalism has been in operation; a revialism which has ignored the sense o f imperial superiority in h e re n t in the Orientalist view. Eliot once said o f Henry James th at ‘h e had a mi nd so fine that no idea could violate it’. The O rien tal mys­ tique draws its strength precisely from such an assum ption. No m odern idea can violate the mystique of the O rient—modern-dav Indian revivalism in the arts has based itself upon this prem ise. If there is a crisis in literary theory, go back to kavyaprakasha or kavyadarsha. If theatre has failed to give you what it sh o u ld , go back to the Natyashastra and find out where the musicians should sit on the stage, what kind o f yavanika should be used, w hat kind o f dances are recom m ended, and when, and so on. Imperialism used its Orientalist scholarship (that individual O rientalists might have been and indeed were fascinated by Asian societies a n d arts was, o f course, true) essentially to emphasize the uniqueness of the O riental world and thereby to dom inate it. Lord Balfour, defending the British supremacy in Egypt, said: I take no attitude of superiority. But I ask [Robertson or any­ one else] . . . who has even the most superficial knowledge of history, if they will look in the face the facts with which a British statesman had to deal when he is put in a posi­ tion o f supremacy over the great races like the inhabitants of E gypt. . . Look at all the oriental countries. Do not talk about superiority or inferiority.4* Just rule them ’, is what Lord Balfour is saying. ‘Yes, the O rie n t is great, let us rule it and make it greater’ is his message. It is im portant to rem ind ourselves of these o rig in s of Orientalism because the post-Independence ‘revivalism’ I am referring to has become a major tendency in Indian writing o n arts and literature. To borrow an expression from Walter Benjamin, this ‘overtaking of the productive passion’ in the nam e o f pure Indianism will reach its sterile limits sooner or later.

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W ith the beginning o f the seventies, however, there has been considerable activity in the Indian arts which has moved away fro m this O rientalist perspective. In our literatures (India has m a n y literatures; to talk o f an Indian literature is no m ore m ean­ in g fu l than to talk o f an European literature) there has developed a n increasing im patience with the revivalist view. Given the Indian situation, this view entailed the dom inance o f literature by the h ig h e r castes and classes. Purely in term s of the social origins of o u r writers, the emphasis has now clearly shifted. T he dom inance o f th e bhadralok (gentry) in the creative enterprise has not alto­ g e th e r disappeared (it cannot and need not), but the num ber of w riters from the lower, castes and classes has shot u p phenom e­ nally. The various Dalit and revolutionary writers* movements in differen t parts o f India speak o f the changed and rapidly chang­ in g literary scene in the country. This shift has signalled, on such a wide scale for th e first time, two things: one, the traditional n o tio n s o f who deals in the written word have changed and are changing; and second, the new writer may not be interested in recreating the great Indian spirit typified by our ‘great’ works, beginning with th e Vedas and the Upanishads. These works, they will readily concede, are great but not quite relevant to their exis­ tence or to their struggles today. The ‘O riental’ wisdom is, in short, n o longer the source o f Indian creativity, i.e. the creativity that is dom inating the Indian scene today. T he tradition is being used b u t in a critical spirit and in m uch the same way as an artist any­ w here in the world would. T he Oriental-Occidental divide does n o t seem m eaningful to the contem porary Indian writer o r artist It does not tell him anything about his creativity o r his problems. T h e so-called O riental o r Indian attitude to art is n o t and cannot b e a theoretical construct. It is like understanding Goethe o r Schiller in term s o f Germanism or Occidentalism. What the artist needs today is a critical aesthetic theory; all the romanticism going with a typical O riental or Indian Weltanschauung cannot provide th at to him.

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T he Indian search for a critical aesthetic theory has b e c o m e sig­ nificant in the context of the artist’s increasing aw areness o f the divided world in his life; this world is no longer a single, unified harmonious one. In the days of the nationalist movem ent i t was still possible and even necessary to think o f our world of experience as one whole reality which could be interpreted differendy. I t has not been appreciated fully that the social reality which m ade fo r this homogeneity was itself a product of an anti-imperialist movement and, as such, was not an immutable, eternal reality. The thirty-seven years of independent India have, if anything, contributed to an increased awareness of our fragmented world. The ‘co m m o n cul­ ture’ in the sense in which Raymond Williams would use th e term or in the sense in which F. R. Leavis would view culture, is sim ply not there.4 We have, instead, fragments. T he most rem arkable fact of the cultural experience o f the various peoples of post-Independence India has been this fragmen­ tation of which, naturally, there have been differing and, a t times, contradictory interpretations. Some have seen it in the Indian artist s unsuccessful attempts at going back to his roots, be it to folk forms in theatre and music or to miniatures and the Tan trie philosophy in painting. Some have seen it as the existence o f a plurality of cultures based on Vedic and non-Vedic notions. The Dalit writers a n d play­ wrights are questioning the entire literary tradition within which they are writing; to them it is of little or no consequence. F or them, the established literary tradition and aesthetic are the high-caste and bourgeois ones. The contradictions for these writers are age-old They view their writing as standing in the same relationship to the established writing as the Pali Jatakas to the latter-day ornate Sanskrit It should be clear that this fragmentation is not a m ere mirror image o f the age-old conflict between the Sanskrit (the cultivated) and the Prakrit (the uncultivated). This fragm entation has a mod­ ern aspect which we cannot comprehend without first understanding capitalism and the relations o f exploitation typical of that m ode of

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p roduction. Further, imperialism imposes an international aesthetic o r d e r o f its own and whose im pact a Dalit writer, writing in the far c o r n e r of Marathwada, cannot escape although he may not be co n scio u s o f coming u nder its influence. T he implications of some of the problems of the new aesthetic o r d e r are quite obvious. T he liberal aesthetic that dom inates the established literary tradition poses a form and content contradic­ tio n which is typical o f capitalism. In an article defending War and Peacey Tolstoy said: W hat is War and Peace? It is n o t a novel, n o r is it a poem, still less an historical chronicle. War and Peace is what the author wanted and could express in the form in which it was expressed. Such a declaration o f disregard by the author for the conventional forms o f prose-fiction m ight have seemed over-confident, had it n o t been deliberate.5 T h e organic relationship betw een form and co n ten t was self-evi­ d e n t to him. If what an author wishes to express involves ‘disregard’ f o r conventional forms, such disregard n o t only is necessary but o u g h t to be deliberate. However, this organic relationship betw een form and content, this insistence that what you wish to say should and does determ ine how you say it, is n o longer selfevident. It cannot be. The social reality which might have produced th e work is internal to it but the beauty or excellence has to be external. Otherwise the commodity will n o t sell. T he fragm entation o f any social experience also follows the same lines. The produc­ tio n of art and the marketing of art are two separate functions, each w ith its own laws. T he fragm entation is, thus, complete. It is the inability to view this fragm entation in its totality, in its m o d e m incarnation, that explains why we have no critical aes­ th etic theory, no adequate critical writing and debate. 3 P art o f the reason for that may be that we in India have n o t yet realized how ‘capitalism’ is hostile towards art. Lukács explained the

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hostility toward art and the place of the m odem artist in capitalism thus: . . . since such tendencies (especially oppression and exploitation o f man by man) attain such a level o f in h u ­ manity in no other society as u nder capitalism . . . every true artist, every true writer as a creative individual is instinctively an enemy o f this distortion o f the priiynple of hum anism , w hether consciously o r not.6 At no point in history were the arts and the artists so placed. The contributions o f capitalism to the arts are rath er lim ited. John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, provides a com pelling arg u m en t for the view that the history o f oil-painting needs to be understood in term s of its relation to the rise o f capitalism and its expression of the way o f seeing the world o f the ru lin g class.7 T he o th e r con­ tribution is the cinema which, in India (I m ean the consumen« cinem a) in any case, has becom e a good exam ple o f Ruskins aphorism: ‘Industry without art is brutality*.8 Anyway, the contradiction between the artist and th e social formation was never so acute; the social and political contradictions are becom ing sharper every day and the arts are no exception to this. T he fragm entation that the sensitive individual perceives around him is indeed the ‘distortion o f the humanistic principle that Lukács wrote about. T he fragm entation is manifold, its com­ plexities, mind-boggling. This does not mean and should not be interpreted to mean that it is an entirely inexplicable phenome­ non. T he ‘no-exit’ view o f reality which has com e to d om inate a lot o f our ‘m odernist’ writing and art is invalid not only because it is a pose, a transplant of a late-capitalist European experience onto a semi-feudal, early-capitalist society, but also because the ‘no-exit theory itself does not see the relationship between social realin and creativity quite clearly. It accepts the ‘distortion o f the hum anist principle’ as an im m utable and unalterable law. The net result is an absurdist view o f society, o f history, o f reality.

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7

In the fragmentation that obtains in India, the artists and writers w h o find themselves on the side o f the oppressed and the exploit­ e d have an im portant legacy to uphold. Beginning with the writings o f th e twenties and the thirties and the Indian People’s T heatre Association (IPTA) movem ent o f the forties, a significant Indian tra d itio n in the arts has been revived, namely the tradition o f the a rts as a movement. Those who restored this tradition found them selves up against the by no means insignificant influence of B ritish pre-War journals like Scrutiny which was against turning ex p erien ce into ‘ideology’s hom eland’,9 and Encounter in the post­ w a r years. The influence of these journals and of the men connect­ e d with them (from F. R. Leavis to Stephen Spender) had led many literary and a rt theoreticians to believe that art and culture were in d e p e n d e n t entities; to attribute to them a social or an ideologi­ cal function was tantam ount to a violation o f their sovereignty. We have had o u r own versions o f Scrutiny and Encounter in the Indian languages as well as in English. T heir mediocrity was n o t their only w eak point. Those who m anaged these journals were unaware of In d ia n history and the fact that all art has flourished as a move­ m e n t, a fact th at is certainly true o f the past two thousand years of In d ian history. T he famous cave-temples o f western India (the first at Bhaja dating to the second century b c ) were a product o f a pop­ u lar and strong Buddhist movement which was a revolt against brahm an ism. The early poetry in most Indian languages was a d irect product o f the Bhakti movement. T he Indian artist has always viewed himself as a part o f a ‘long revolution’.10 Indian art a n d writing since the thirties, the more powerful o f them that is, have been a product o f the anti-imperialist movement, and so on. In d ian tradition, thus, has been a markedly ideological one and Indian art has always had som ething to say. Not only that b u t those who created it did so with the express purpose of conveying some­ thing, o f building up something. This is not to say that there have been no o th er traditions. O f course there have been. T he point here, however, is that the ‘people’ dimension has been equally strong. To cite a perhaps not so well-known example from the field

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o f music—the origins o f tappa singing are very interesting. T h e re were a num ber of songs which the people of the Punjab used to sing when they moved from one place to another in caravans o f camels. Towards the end o f the eighteenth century, Ghulam Rasul K han, a very distinguished vocalist at the Lucknow court, was struck during his travels in the Punjab by the originality and freshness o f those songs. H e incorporated some of them and their typical style into the classical style and the outcome was the tappa.11 A new form of singing came into existence as a result o f interaction with people. Those who are emphasizing the divided character of o u r w orld are not doing anything unusual or unprecedented; they are relating the arts once again to the people. This aspect has a bearing on the hostility to art that is inherent in capitalism. M odem capitalist soci­ ety imposes loneliness upon men. In fact, this loneliness is a m ajor them e of a lot of new writing and art. M odern society is anti-people. T he new artist/protagonist we have been talking about, however, wants a dialogue. He believes words, colours, gestures, all have a meaning; and that communication is possible. What the critical aes­ thetic theory has failed to do is explain why communication appears to be impossible. It must be able to explain not only the predica­ m ent o f this protagonist but also deal with the fact that he—as the representative of a whole class of people, in a m anner of speaking— is a result of the fragmentation. 4 Against this background one should look at the concept of progress. T he crucial question is not w hether there is progress in art. T he m ore relevant form ulation is that there is a view of progress which goes into the making o f art. Victor H ugo said, in Les Miserables, ‘T he real title o f this dram a is: Progress’.12 In o th e r words, worthwhile art involves xuithin itself the notion o f progress. This is the reason why Lenin said, ‘Tolstoy is original, because the sum lulal o f his views taken as a whole happens to express the spc: cific features of o u r revolution as a peasant bourgeois revolution’ (emphasis as in original). He thought o f Tolstoy as ‘the m irror of

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th e R ussian Revolution’.15 O ne may m ention here, in passing, S olzhenytsin’s view o f War and Peace. In August 1914, Solzhenytsin a ttrib u te s th e failure o f the Russian Generals on the eastern front, p articu larly in the battle o f Tennenberg, to their reading o f the ro m an ticized version o f Kutuzov’s campaign in Tolstoy’s novel. T h e n e t result: the disastrous defeat o f 1917, leading to the cre­ atio n o f the Soviet state! In short, if the notion o f progress is a b sen t in o n e ’s consideration o f art, this is where one lands up. Fragm entation and contradiction are the preoccupation of the a rtist T hese will be increasingly sharpened in view of the fact that econom ic and political structures in our country are n o t particu­ larly stable and are n o t likely to stay stable either. In postIndependence India, these contradictions were articulated around the seventies. The economic and political crisis that this country is living through also dates from that period. Balzac had said of N apoleon that his example was fatal to the n in eteen th . century ‘because o f the pretensions it inspires in so many mediocrities’.14 It would seem that Balzac was wrong in assuming that N apoleon’s exam ple was fatal only for the nineteenth century. In such a situation it is small wonder that some writers are talk­ ing in th eir works not of an ‘I’ but rather o f a ‘we’. What gives their work a distinct character is their emphasis on ‘our’ experience. Brecht left an unfinished play called The Story o f the Egotist Johann Fatzer. T h e play is about an egotist in a world where individualism has becom e an obsolete idea.15 We still have some egotist Fatzers around, n o d o u b t But it is becoming quite clear that ‘o u r’ experi­ ence is m ore relevant and plainly just more interesting in artistic terms than ‘my’ experience. The need for a critical aesthetic theo­ ry is all th e greater today precisely because the central question now is: who are the ‘we’ and who are the ‘they’? There has not been ade­ quate discussion among the Indian artists on this question at all. First published in The Truth Unites: Essays in Tribute to Samar Sen (Calcutta, 1985)

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Notes 1 As quoted in Albert School, La Revolution Française (Paris, 1965), p. 9. Translation from the French by Kalindi Deshpande. 2 This distinction is based on Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978). 3 Ibid. p. 32. 4 This is a notion which Raymond Williams defines in his ‘Culture and Revolution: A Response’, in Terry Eagleton and Brian Wicker, eds., From Culture to Revolution (London, 1968), p. 308. There, the idea presumably has a futuristic meaning as the ‘com­ mon culture’ would be realizable in a society ‘whose values are at once commonly created . . . and where the discussions and exclusions of class may be replaced by the reality of common and equal membership. That, still, is the idea of a common cul­ ture’. Of course, its futuristic character does not make it any less ambiguous or abstract. 5 Leo Tolstoy, ‘A Few Words about the Book “War and Peace” \ in Russian Archive (Moscow, 1868), NO. 3, reproduced in A. V. Knowles, ed., Tolstoy. The Critical Heritage (London, 1978), p. 125. 6 Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic (London, 1978), p. 69. 7 The summary of John Berger’s view is from Leslie Johnson, Cultural Critics (Canada, 1979), p. 160. 8 As cited in Anand K Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers, VOL. 2 in Roger Lipsey, ed., Metaphysics (Princeton, 1977). 9 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London, 1976), p. 15. 10 The term belongs to Raymond Williams. His book of that name was published in 1961 (London). 11 Keshavrao Bhole, Astal (in Marathi), a collection of essays on music (Bombay, 1962), p. 21. 12 As quoted in Mary McCarthy, Ideas and the Novel (London, 1980), p. 40. 13 See Lenin’s article, ‘Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution’ in his Collected Works (Moscow, 1973), VOL. 15, pp. 202-209. 14 As quoted by McCarthy, Ideas and the Novel, p. 71. 15 This play is one of those ‘fragments’ Brecht left behind. No English translation exists as far as I know. The few scenes which he did complete and his commentary are included in v o l . 7 of his Collected Works (Berlin, 1965).

D i a l e c t i c s o f Defeat: So me R e f l e c t i o n s on L i t e r a t u r e , Theatre a n d M u s i c in C o lo n ia l I n d i a Now is a phase of fatigue in history and yet here are crowds of men and women engaged in preparation. They yearn for ushering in a new spotless earth in accord with their vision of humanity forging ahead. —-Jibanananda Das W hat this essay attem pts to do is to take a look at what happened to th e aesthetic and creative experiences and urges o f the people o f In d ia during colonial rule (perhaps we could call it the ‘colo­ nial aesthetic experience’) and illustrate its points with select exam ples from three Indian languages. What follows, therefore, is not a literary history o f m odern India. Rather, it is an attem pt to identify some trends and tendencies in Indian literature and the­ atre which owe their origins to the colonial experience. T he three language areas I have kept in view for the purpose o f my argum ent are Bangla, H indi and Marathi. However, it is my belief that the tendencies discussed are not limited only to these languages; they must be n o less visible and m arked in o th er areas and languages too. T he only difference m ight be chronological as it is, for exam­ ple, in th e case of the three discussed here. T he dates o f the first ‘m o d ern ’ plays in Indian languages might vary. In fact, they do but that has more, to do with the time of the British taking over a given area u n d e r their im perial wings. Otherwise, the aesthetic and cre­ ative experience of the Indian people during the colonial period shows rem arkable similarities. (There are, no doubt, differences as well b u t they lie outside the scope of this essay.) An attem pt has been m ade in the following argum ent to keep the num ber o f author-nam es and titles to a minimum. At times, im portant writers or poets have been left out—Jibanananda Das or Hari Narayan Apte would have naturally featured in any liter­ ary history but, as explained earlier, this essay does not claim to

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be such a one. It is also possible that o th er com m entators o r his­ torians m ight choose different o r better examples. My essay tries to describe a trend or tendency and exam ine its connections w ith and roots in the colonial experience. Thus, the question o f w hich au th o r o r playwright best represents that tendency is n ot very c e n ­ tral to my argum ent. T h e scope o f this essay has been, in the main, limited to th e nineteenth century. References to the twentieth century are n o t entirely absent but are, essentially, com plem entary in character. T he year 1800 acts as my starting p o in t The nineteenth cen tu ry was the high noon o f British imperialism and the rule o f Q u e en Victoria (she ascended the throne in 1837) which spans the ce n ­ tury, showed in many ways the quintessential characteristics o f imperialism. T he bhadralok o f British India tried to im itate Victorian mores and morals. Modernity, capitalism, liberalism a n d new literary forms came to India in their Victorian avatars. A n d it was in contra-distinction to the arrogance and ideals o f the Victorian age that India’s search for a bourgeois sensibility a n d identity was carried out. O ur sensibility did not quite becom e bourgeois, but that is another matter. T he desire or the objective of the new Western-educated elite was certainly to be so fo r it thought that the non-bourgeois (i.e. non-Western) aim was a crime! O r so it would seem.

T he singlemost im portant intervention th at colonialism m ade in the cultural life o f India over the last two centuries was the estab ­ lishm ent of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. Rarely are historical events so obedient to the compulsions o f the calendar. Come the nineteenth century and there begins, in the very first year, a new era in the history of Indian literature and theatre, an e ra of im perial intervention. T he College, established by the East India Company to train its adm inistrators in the languages o f India, provided facilities for teaching Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, H industani, Bangla, Tamil, Marathi and Kannada. The city of

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Calcutta, an obscure little village when the British acquired it in the la te seventeenth century, had by then becom e a m ajor centre o f political and econom ic power. T he Empire had spread and the B ritish rulers in Calcutta needed an army of trained administrators w h o could deal with the natives and their problem s in the vernac­ u la r and Fort William College was established with that purpose in m in d . Close to Calcutta, in Srirampur, missionaries had estab­ lish ed the first printing press and begun publishing theological w orks such as the Dharma Pustak, a Bangla translation o f the Bible. Any account o f literary movements in colonial India will have to give due credit to the role played by these institutions in the new literature and theatre that grew and developed in the whole o f India in the nineteenth century. It was through these institu­ tio n s that colonialism intervened in the field o f arts and literature w ith far-reaching consequences. With the decline o f Sanskrit as an instrum ent o f cultural expres­ sion, several things died o u t The most notable casualty was the decline and eventual eclipse o f theatre. Works in Sanskrit continued to be written once in a while. Secular aesthetics was not altogether unknow n to the Indian tradition, both classical and folk, but it had ceased to make an impact of any significance. The Bhakti move­ m e n t and the resurgence of poetry it effected from the twelfth to th e seventeenth centuries had also been forgotten. By the end of th e eighteenth century, Bhakti poetry was no longer read as poetry o r even as poetry of the revolt against brahmanism which, in fact, is w hat it was. A strange lapse of memory had occurred. Poets like Tukaram o f Kabir were now being interpreted as writers of ‘devo­ tional poetry’. A measure o f the decline of Sanskrit criticism can be seen in a figure like Madhusudan Saraswati, critic and contem po­ rary o f Akbar and Tulsidas, whose work on the rasa theory pleaded for the inclusion of the Bhakti in the rasas but whose discussion of the Bhakti rasa made no reference to Tulsidas, his contem porary and easily the most well-known of the Bhakti poets o f north India o r ‘H industhan’, as it was then called. Literary criticism thus had becom e a dead enterprise well before colonial rule came to India.

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British intervention in the field o f literature, therefore, c o u ld n ot have come at a more appropriate time. Fort William C o lleg e began its work by standardizing the languages it was teaching— it first compiled and published dictionaries in those languages. N o t that there were no dictionaries in the Indian languages b u t the developm ent o f dictionaries is pardy a function of any la n g u a g e which m ust serve as the language o f administration, statecraft a n d so on. British rule contributed to the growth o f the In d ia n ver­ naculars by turning them into useful and usable in stru m en ts of statecraft. With the exception of Marathi during the M arath a ascendancy in western India, no Indian language was used as an official language throughout the medieval period of Indian history. T hat situation changed with the British. T he dom inance of Persian in most parts o f northern India as the language o f high culture and high administration finally came to an end. T he British started schools in the native languages, a m atter in w hich the Bombay Presidency seems to have taken the lead—by th e m id­ dle of the nineteenth century there were m ore Marathi m edium schools in M aharashtra than ever. Fort William College also worked on rendering the Hitopades, the Panchatantm, the Vetal Panchavimsati and other popular Sanskrit works into Indian ver­ naculars. In so doing, the pandits in its monopoly opened new vis­ tas before the ‘natives’ in the use o f their languages. It looked as if the colonialists had seen the wisdom of the ancient Indian vyakarana formulation saktampadam (‘the word is powerful’; some liberty has been taken in this translation. It was possible and nec­ essary as the sutra is clearly taken out of its context. Besides, slesha is a permissible literary device after all!) and had decided to mas­ ter the native word with a view to dom inating the native. But it was not a one-way traffic. Dominance and loot constitute the essence of imperialism. At the same time, it is also true that, domestically, new kinds o f economic relations were being introduced. The colo­ nial state was very unlike any earlier form o f state that the Indian people had known. India was forced into a new era. To describe this era as an era of modernity is not really saying much. What happened

1

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15

d u rin g the colonial phase was that ‘different sides o f the great geopolitical divide . . . two worlds and “two histories” M—to use P e rry Anderson’s phrase (used by him in a different context, of course)—-confronted each other. This confrontation was bound to have as strange and unlikely results as the confrontation itself. On the cultural plane, the contradictory nature o f the results was the most obvious. A sensitive mind was reacting to things E uropean, at times with great enthusiasm, at times with defiance b u t, most often, with a mixture of both. Nowhere else is this mixed response as clearly visible as in literature and theatre. The literary m ovem ents o f nineteenth-century India vividly reveal the fact that th e various phenom ena within a movement quite often evince con­ tradictory manifestations. T he Indian elite’s relationship with colo­ nialism is one such case and our literature and theatre demonstrate th at better than any other. T he impact of English was so thorough that even the syntax of Indian languages underw ent a change. T here is a book apdy entided ‘The English Incarnation of Marathi Prose’.2 To cite just one example: a sentence such as ‘I told him that I would m eet him at 7 p .m .’ was unknown to traditional Marathi speech. Ordinarily, a speaker o f Marathi always said: ‘I would m eet him at 7 p.m., I told him ’. O r ‘I do not see the sight which you see’ would become, in tra­ ditional Marathi speech, ‘You are seeing a sight I do not see’ and so on. Sentence-structure and modes of speech changed and it is inter­ esting to see how the traditional forms of address changed as well. T he colonial experience made us aware o f ‘culture’ as a sepa­ rate world o f discourse. No Indian language had a specific term for ‘culture’ before colonization. This obviously did not m ean that there was no culture but that culture as an autonom ous world o f discourse did n o t exist. Everything was dharm a. Going to a tem­ ple was dharm a, singing a raga or a ragini was also dharm a. D harm a in this context not m eaning religion but indicating a space which an individual creates or obtains in a given area— action, duty or creation. A space which was part o f the whole, a con­ tinuous space. Hence, such diverse actions as singing, worshipping

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o r procreating were all described as dharm a. It was a secu lar c o n ­ cept except that its secular m eaning is n o t as relevant to th is dis­ cussion as the fact that it allowed discontinuities in discourse. T h e encounter with colonialism and, through it, with capitalism brought us the world o f autonom ous cultural discourse. T h e w ord sanskriti, commonly used for culture in almost all In d ian lan­ guages is, in fact, an invention o f the colonial era. T he o th e r w ord being proposed at that time was kristi. Loosely translated, it w ould m ean ‘cultivation’ and would be a near-exact -translation o f the G erm an bildung. It is not that there was no history to the w o rd san­ skriti T here was. T he Aitereya Brahmana refers to begetting p ro g e ­ ny also as silpa (the art o f sculpture), hence as samskara.3 A t any rate, R abindranath Tagore preferred sanskriti to kristi p artly because o f these roots and, partly, because kristi (unlike its m e a n ­ ing in classical Sanskrit) m eant the five jaatis o r subgroups o f the Aryans, the panchakrstayah, namely Anu, D ruhu, Turwas, Yadu an d P uru.4 Suniti Kumar Chatteiji drew Tagore’s attention to the usage o f the word sanskrit in Marathi (sometime in 1922) in the sense o f culture.5 Be that as it may, finding words for anything is to define i t An attem pt was m ade to define ‘culture’, define the limits o f cultural discourse and its autonomy. In a sense, the European occupation forced us to define several things a n d cul­ tural discourse was one of them . W hether it is Tagore o r A charya Javdekar or Acharya Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, several Indian intellec­ tuals and writers have at different times com m ented upon ‘culture* and the proper Indian word for i t As I have m entioned earlier, the linguistic experience o f the Indian people underw ent a change during this period. It was, of course, different in different areas. In n orth India, the colonial period m arked the final em ergence of Hindi with the Devanagari script as the language of cultural expression. Ronald Stuart McGregor has succinctly described the phenom enon: While H industani and Persian m ight serve the East Indian Company as languages of com m erce and law, it was realized by some that there would henceforth be a

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role in no rth India for another form o f language which should n o t rely as heavily as H industani on Persian and Arabic vocabulary, but should approxim ate m ore nearly in vocabulary and cultural affiliation to the various regional and local dialects spoken by the mass o f popula­ tion and should be written in the Devanagari script Perhaps Brijbhasa itself m ight serve but given the curren­ cy o f the Delhi speech (sometimes referred to as ‘Khari Boli’) it was inevitable that the latter should becom e the basis o f the new language, Sanskritic rather than Persian in cultural affiliation, not ‘created by the British but owing its main development to new conditions brought about by their pres­ ence, which begins to com e into prom inence in the early nineteenth century . . . (emphasis added) .6 T he case o f the em ergence of Hindi has been cited because quite unwittingly the colonial initiative contributed to the process of forging the dialects in the north Indian region into a language capable o f m odern, cultural expression. This was true o f other Indian languages as well. The early nineteenth-century writers—at least some o f them —gave the British m ore credit for it than they deserved. See, for example, what Ramkamal Sen had to say in his preface to his Bangla-English Dictionary (1830): W hatever has been done towards the revival o f the Bengali language, its im provem ent and in fact the estab­ lishm ent o f it as a language, must be attributed to that excellent m an Carey and his colleagues.7 Carey was professor o f Bangla and Sanskrit at Fort William College. In short, the credit which Sen wished to attribute to Carey was, in fact, by lakshana (suggested m eaning) being attributed to British rule. 2

T hat was, however, not the only ‘creditable’ aspect o f the colonial cultural experience. Formalization o f the m odern language

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occurred through the prom inence that prose acquired in Indian literature during this period. Prose traditions were n o t entirely absent in vernacular literatures in pre-colonial times—in M arathi, the beginnings o f the literary tradition are associated with the prose writing o f the Mahanubhavas (twelfth century a d ) . In Hindi or Bangla, however, prose writing really begins with the colonial period. Pre-colonial literary expression was necessarily in poetry which is, partly, due to the oral tradition which has dom inated Indian civilization. With the printing press, prose became a feasi­ ble m ode o f cultural expression. The first half o f the nineteenth century is the period when prose styles em erge in different Indian languages. With writers like Krishnashastri Chiplunkar and his son Vishnushastri (in Marathi) and Ram m ohun Roy (in Bangla), prose became ‘the vehicle o f philosophic exposition and religious and social polem ic’.8 T here is som e p o in t in p u ttin g the Chiplunkars—father and son—and Ram m ohun Roy together because they represent opposite poles o f the polemical debate that began with Roy and reached its high point in Jotirao Phule. Jotirao Phule, who died in 1880, is only now attracting histori­ ans’ attention, which is a pity. Phule, unlike Rammohun Roy who was for reformed Vedantism, was a complete rebel against the brah­ man i cal tradition and had an organic link with the social ethos that the low-caste Marathi Bhakti poetry represented. M odem Indian historiography has ignored this man until very recently and the com­ monly heard Dalit criticism—that the high-caste, English-educated historians felt at hom e with the positions taken and the reform s advocated by people like Roy and Agarkar but would not to u ch a kunbi (low peasant) like Phule with a barge pole—is not entirely baseless. The Dalit critics do not underestim ate the contribution of Roy and others but they might prefer to believe that Phule, rather than Roy, ‘is one of those great m en who are bom at a critical m om ent in their country’s history, and who shape its destiny’.9 O ne may o r may n o t share the view about the bhadralok pref­ erence for somebody o f their stock. It is, however, true that, begin­ ning roughly in the middle o f the nineteenth century, prose not

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only became a vehicle o f philosophic exposition but also the incisive re c o rd of the ‘diagnosis o f o u r tim e’. T he essay o f that nam e by Karl M annheim begins thus: Let us take the attitude o f a doctor who tries to give a sci­ entific diagnosis o f the illness from which we all suffer. T here is no doubt that o u r society has been taken ill. W hat is the disease, and what would be its cure? If I had to summarise the situation in a single sentence I would say: ‘We are living in an age o f transition . . .*10 In a way, Roy and Phule were also talking of transition except th a t they were not uncertain about it, unlike M annheim. O n the contrary, they were looking forward to it. This is the reason why, even in their sharpest polemics, the early social reform ers and the essayists are optimistic. Looking back, the most striking quality of In d ian vernacular prose, w hether of Roy or Agarkar or Phule, is th e general sense o f optimism that seems to underlie their writing. Agarkar, Phule and Roy are critical of society and quite ruthless in th e ir diagnoses but they are never pessimistic about the future of th a t society. They are the m en o f vision Jibanananda Das talks a b o u t in his poem cited at the start o f this essay. Phule is, in fact, militantly optimistic. He was the first Indian to have introduced peasantry as a class in his writing which Rosalind O ’H anlon has discussed at some length in her recent study o f M ahatma Jotirao P hule and low-caste protest in nineteenth-century western India.11 H is most eloquent piece discusses what the peasants can do about th e ir miserable lot and exploitation, entitled ‘T he Whip of the Peasantry’ (Setkaryacha Asud). Phule thought in caste term s but his _oncern about caste was n ot limited to protesting against the homo hierarchichus that the caste system postulated. He was talking about homo economincus but in term s o f the vamas. His literary output has rem ained largely ignored because of the bhadralok dom inance o f o u r historiography. Otherwise it would have been easy to see that h e was India’s first ‘radical’ playwright, essayist and poet. Even the ‘left’ criticism has failed to come to terms with the ‘m ilitant opti­ m ism ’ o f Phule’s writing. In a way, colonialism, and the fact that

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Phule was not as fiercely anti-imperialist as Tilak, m ight have b een responsible for it. Be that as it may, the colonial experience m ad e the Indian intellectual and writer aware of the movement o f his­ tory. Phule represents its most im portant example because, as a representative of the lower castes and classes in the latter h a l f of the nineteenth century, he saw the inevitable change in o u r socie­ ty and how British imperialism was historically playing a p ro g re s ­ sive role. He articulated the dialectics o f defeat. He had no u s e for the liberals’ enthusiasm for British rule and, at the same tim e, saw vividly the limitations o f the orthodox nationalist p ro g ram m e.12 T he encounter with the West seems to have produced q u ite a spectrum of attitudes and responses both towards the West and towards India. Michael M adhusudan Dutt represents a typical case o f the confusion and the bewildering responses of the time. This talented playwright and poet, to whom one can safely attribute the credit o f writing the first genuinely m odern play in India ( Sarmistha, 1858), was even doubtful about writing in Bangla. He wrote some rather tepid verse in English but, before long, discovered th a t his writing in English made no impact on anyone. His enthusiasm for things Western was so extraordinary that he wrote of his favourite poet Milton: ‘Nothing can be better than Milton . . . I don’t think it is possible to equal Virgil, Kalidas and Tasso. Though glorious, still they are mortal poets. Milton is divine’.13 This comparison of Milton with the ancient Indian poet Kalidas is interesting in view of what Warren Hastings had said in his letter to Nathaniel Smith on the Bhagwad Gita. It will not be fair to try its relative worth by a comparison with the original text of the first standards of European composi­ tion; but let these be taken even in the most esteemed o f their prose translations and in that equal scale let their mer­ its be weighed. I should not fear to place in opposition to the best French versions o f the most adm ired passages of the Iliad or Odyssey, or of the first and the sixth books of our own Milton, highly as I venerate the latter, the English translation o f the Mahabharata (emphasis added).14

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H astings wrote that letter in 1784. Dutt’s rem ark belongs to the late fifties of the nineteenth century. More than two hundred years after H astings’ letter it is easy to see that he was closer to the truth than D u tt. But that was because Hastings wrote from a position of colo­ n ia l dominance and, hence, could take a m ore detached view of the tw o traditions involved. Dutt was a victim o f the colonial situation th a t was bound to lead to a sceptical attitude towards his own inher­ itance. His conversion to Christianity itself or his claim that he was w riting Indian mythology in the Greek style showed his ambivalence towards the Indian tradition. T he nineteenth-century intellectual w riter was caught between the two tendencies of either rejection of o r excessive glorification of that tradition. It is doubtful if the East a n d West really m et in the nineteenth century. It is my opinion that they confronted each other. Michael M adhusudhan Dutt and Vishnushastri Chiplunkar represent the two mutually opposite types o f writers that this confrontation produced. T here were also interesting parallels between the European attitudes o f the nineteenth century and the Indian ones. It was an age o f the new. T he words nava, navin or nutan (all m eaning new) seem to dom inate the thinking o f the intellectuals and writers o f th e nineteenth century. Com pare this to H olbrook Jackson’s assessment: in The Eighteen Nineties, he characterized the period as typified by books titled The New Hedonism and The New Fiction and by m ovem ents calling themselves ‘New Paganism ’, ‘New Voluptuousness’ and, in obvious reaction, ‘New Remorse’ but also ‘New Spirit’, ‘New H um our’, ‘New Realism’, ‘New Drama’, to say n o th in g o f ‘New U nionism ’ and ‘New W oman’.15 This is not to suggest that the Indian ‘new’ was the same as the European ‘new’ o f th e late nineteenth century. They could not have been. T he lat­ te r was the ‘new’ of the bourgeois experience, the ‘new’ of the tri­ u m p h an t powers and peoples. T he Indian ‘new’ was the ‘new’ of the defeated, colonized people. But the search for the ‘new’ becom es inevitable when you become a part o f the process o f cap­ italisation (clearly in an extended and secondary way). T he critique o f society also takes forms which are, at times, com­ parable to those made by the European critics. Agarkar wrote more

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than five essays on ‘the dress of our menfolk’ in the 1880s. H is dis­ cussion of the Indian dress (prevalent among the upper-caste Maharashtrians of the time) was not very friendly or appreciative.16 Had he been a novelist he would have made his character dism iss it in much the same way as Marcel Proust had his dandified Block renounce the watch and the umbrella as ‘insipid bourgeois im p le­ m ents’.17 Agarkar’s critique of the headgear, the coat and ja c k e t of his contem poraries in Pune is, o f course, in different term s. Nevertheless, the parallels are striking. Different perspectives emerge from the different positions that an essayist like A garkar in a colonial society occupied and a novelist like Proust in France did. But the newly educated H indu in nineteenth-century India w as in a self-critical m ood. His self-criticism, like th at o f ‘many b o u r­ geois’ o f nineteenth-century Europe, as Peter Gay has p o in ted out, turned itself into ‘self-laceration’. This may, perhaps, explain the contem porary Hindu revivalism in India and the high tid e of conservatism in western Europe. Very much like the bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century Europe, the educated Hindu o f that generation indulged in, to use Peter Gay’s words again, ‘collective denunciations with an aridity that would have done honour to a tribe of masochists’.18 This led to the phenom enon which George Bernard Shaw very aptly described in his preface to Dickens’ Hard Times in 1912: ‘The first half of the n ine­ teenth century considered itself the greatest of all centuries. T he sec­ ond discovered that it was the wickedest’. In India, the time frame was different but the reversal of estimates was almost similar. A tra­ dition created by Keshab Chandra Sen or M. G. Ranade, D utt or Agarkar o r Phule was replaced by the one created by Bankimchandra Chatteijee and Vishnushastri Chiplunkar. The ‘new’ thought was considered to be the greatest in the early part of our colonial experience. Before long it was discovered to be the wickedest. This was, partly, to be expected. As in Europe, in India too ‘the trium phs of the new, o f the secular, of science were far from com­ plete and undisputed’. In 1895, Emile Durkheim could deplore

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th e s e times o f ‘renascent mysticism’.19 Rabindranath Tagore, Keshavsut and Prem chand represented the high point o f Indian creativity being truly universal. On the whole, these are exceptions w hich prove the rule: in a colonial society, understanding the speci­ ficity of the colonial situation and thus establishing and reasserting identity were the main objectives o f creative pursuit. This may be the reason why the novel as a genre never really to o k off in India. Again, Tagore, Bankimchandra, Premchand and K etkar could be cited as great novelists. Yet it would be true to say th a t the Indian novel really comes into its own in post-colonial times. Lukács argued that the novel was the genre of the bourgeois epoch. It is doubtful if in a colonized society one can actually speak o f a proper bourgeois epoch. Indian literatures boasted of various form s of narrative which were fascinating and varied. What is not clear is whether they could be described as novels proper. The nine­ teenth- and early twentieth-century Indian novel was closer to tradi­ tional narrative than the polyphonic novel that Bakhtin talked of. Balzac, in a famous statement in the preface to Im Comédie Humaine, asserted that he wanted to compete with civil society, not simply ‘represent’ i t 20 T he Indian novel has rem ained largely representa­ tional. There has been highly interesting work done lately on Bankimchandra and Ketkar. The insights that these works provide on the fiction of these writers are very useful. Yet they do not quite establish them as creators of m odern fiction which represents ‘a problematic hero whose ideals were more or less systematically con­ tradicted by social reality’ or as works similar to those of ‘critical realists like Balzac and Tolstoy’ which ‘disclose dimensions of con­ temporary history that challenged their own explicit ideologies’.21 In aesthetic terms, the Indian bourgeois sensibility is scarcely fifty years old. In earlier times, it rose to these heights only in bits and flashes. T hat is the reason, perhaps, why the Indian short story offered richer fare than the Indian novel. O ur great novels have been a proto-history o f the novel. The history has ju st begun. It might be useful to refer to the fact that some contem porary observers o f the literary scene had seen the limitations of the

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Indian novel. A good example o f this is the essay on the novel that Rajwade wrote in 1905. He was highly critical of the contem porary Indian novel and had even suggested that Indian novelists d o not understand ‘realism’ and that they do n o t see the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘realistic’.22 In poetry, however, extraordinary heights were reached. Rabindranath Tagore is the most well-known example and hardly needs any elaboration here. The romantic tradition in Indian poetry has been quite strong. M odern Indian poetry begins with M adhusudan Dutt. In terms o f form this extraordinary m an made many experiments. He was the first to write sonnets in any Indian language. He was also the first to have discovered the music o f the blank verse. His compositions in the traditional matra vrttas (Sanskrit variation o f the rhymed verse) are not insignificant. In Hindi, Marathi and Bangla, like in other languages of India, poetry took to newer forms, the sonnet and blank verse being th e most notable ones. Romantic verse became popular towards the e n d of the nineteenth century. In Marathi, for example, the most glori­ ous period o f romantic poetry comes to an en d sometime in 1920. This romanticism was, however, marked by despair—im ages of darkness, long endless nights, loneliness and pessimism. T here were a few exceptions such as Tagore o r Keshavsut whose poetry rose above this. Some critics m ight doubt even that because they think that such imagery was a necessary p art o f the poets’ craft and creativity. O ne volume of criticism discussing such p o etry (in Marathi) was entitled Andhar Yatra (journey into darkness).23 A defeated people were articulating their romanticism. It could have only been the romanticism of despair. T h e dialectics o f defeat result in a co-existence o f despair and romanticism. O ne has not seen (Andhar Yatra included) much writing on the end-century rom antics which places their rom antic despair in the context of our colonial experience. What sustained our poetry was the fact that the bulk of Indian writing had been in poetic terms. It was a genre with the longest and the most productive history in our literatures. The result was that

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t h e new poet in India was on firmer ground when he attem pted p o etry . His colonial experience in a peculiar way contributed to his se a rc h for the reasons for his despair. There is a short essay by Rahul Sankrityayan on Bharatendu Harishchandra called Bharalendu aur Pushkin,24 The thrust of Sankrityayan’s argum ent is to compare the rebellious spirit of the two poets. If Bharatendu was worried about th e Bharat durdasha, Pushkin was worried about the decline of Russia, its backwardness. He was pained as much as any Indian of th e colonial times was, to have to argue that Russia had a history. Sankrityayan’s observations (which can be extended to many poets in o th er Indian languages) are not im portant because o f the paral­ lels and similarities he sees in the poetry of the two men which may be dismissed as purely coincidental. (He, in fact, finds it interesting th a t both men lived rather short lives.) It is even doubtful if B haratendu had ever read Pushkin; he could not have. Rahul’s observations are im portant because he has related the work o f the two poets to the states in which they found their country. O ne can, perhaps, take the argum ent one step ahead. Indian po etry o f the nineteenth and the early twentieth century was an expression of a dam aged civilization. Imperialism introduced new forms, new modes of expression but it never completely integrated the aesthetic of the new Indian literature with its own. It could not have. This is m ore apparent in the poetry o f the colonial period than perhaps in any other form of literature. 3 D ram a was another area where the colonial age introduced and contributed several new, hitherto unknown, forms. In fact, it was an enterprising Russian gentlem an, one Lebedeff, who produced the first ‘m o d ern ’ play in English in Calcutta on November 11, 1795. It appears that there was a second perform ance of this play on March 21, 1796.25 T he first m odern play by an Indian was also in English—K. M. Banerji wrote ‘a play in a western m anner’, The Persecuted, in 1832.26 Soon after, however, theatre activity began in

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the Presidency areas. Prasanna Kumar Tagore founded the H in d u Nalak Mandali in Decem ber 1831. Balsasu i Jam bhekar w rote an editorial note in the first ever Marathi periodical Darpana (founded by him in 1832) welcoming the Mandali.27 The first Marathi ‘m odem ’ play by Vishnudas Bhave w en t on stage on November 3, 1843. Lakshm an Sim ha tra n sla te d Shakuntala in 1863 and may have been indebted in this en terp rise to Iswarchandra Vidyasagar’s Bangla prose translation o f th e same which was published in 1854.28 T he Marathi and Malayalee Shakuntala went on stage in 1880. Understandably, Shakespeare seems to have provided a m ajor source for early translators. Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, The Merchant o f Venice seem to have been particularly popular. Likewise, Sanskrit plays provided another inexhaustible source. Perhaps because o f the strong tradition o f folk and regional theatre, dram a easily became the most prestigious and popular form . In the course o f his b rief lifetim e, B h araten d u H arishchandra wrote close to two score plays, both translations and originals. Right from the beginning o f m odern Indian dram a, folk and classical forms have dom inated the m ode o f dram atic com position. Strangely, Sahasrabuddhe traces the history of Marathi dram a from 1880 (the date of Kirloskar’s Shakuntala going on stage) because he thought that Bhave’s plays did n o t rep ­ resent m odern dram a—Bhave’s plays mixed ‘elem ents from bharudy tamasha, lalit, dasavatara and so o n ’.29 This is the most extraordinary statem ent to make; not only because it does injus­ tice to Bhave but also because it postulates a misplaced contradic­ tion between traditional forms o f theatre and m odern dram a. T he exact opposite o f this attitude was heard by this author in a semi­ nar in Delhi where a former official of the Sangeet Natak Akademi claimed credit for introducing and adopting folk forms for the use o f m odern theatre. The process had begun a good one hundred and forty years before the official’s words. Even Kirloskar, who according to Sahasrabuddhe is the first genuine m odern play­ wright, did the same. Bharatendu used forms like bhana and satta-

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ka in the nineteenth century b u t in his plays, although the dia­ logues were in H indi, the verse was in dialect, presumably the Brajbhasa. After all, Lalluji Lai, one o f the founders o f m odern H indi diction, said in 1808: ‘Everyone speaks Brajbhasa, it is as g re a t as Sanskrit. All poets use it. They think it to be the source of th e great rasa’.30 It would appear that even in B haratendu’s time th e H indi play was, linguistically, a mixed affair. Over the years theatre acquired a major political significance. Many writers attem pted to use theatre in the anti-imperialist strug­ gle. Khadikar, whose im portant works were penned from the 1890s to about the mid-1920s, was an immensely popular and gifted play­ w right He also became a political playwright Quite a few o f his plays were banned and he was jailed a num ber o f times. The use of allegory, satire, recreation and reinterpretation of history in mod­ e rn , nationalist terms became a feature of Indian playwriting. At the same time, from the 1870s onwards, Indian theatre showed a rem arkable range o f formal experim entation. O n the o n e hand, traditional form s like Dasavatara or Yakshagana con­ trib u ted to the richness o f fare along with Sanskrit form s like prahasana or bhana. O n the other, Parsi theatre, which became popu­ lar after the 1870s with its rich and complex narrative and influ­ ences o f Marathi and Gujarati theatre, generally tended towards a very dazzling spectacle and a good plot. M anmohan Basu, in his play on H arishchandra written in 1875, went fairly close to the Ja tra form. Natyasangeet, so very popular on the Marathi stage, will be m entioned later. But its role in formal experim entation should not be underm ined. In the first years of the twentieth century, theatre had become quite popular and we even have playwrights living off their work. G. B. Deval may well be the first Indian playwright who went to a c o u rt o f law to establish his royalty rights and actually won the case! Admittedly, it is in the twentieth century that Bangla and M arathi theatre reach their high point, a period which has not b e e n covered in this essay. The excellence o f a Tagore or a Khadilkar is seen essentially in the twentieth century (although

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Tagore’s first play was written in 1881 and Khadilkar’s in 1891). But by the tu rn o f the century, m odern theatre had come to stay and was a flourishing tradition in M aharashtra and Bengal. In many ways, m odern theatre was the Indian’s attem pt to come to terms with his heritage and to face the situation created by colo­ nialism and the new ideas and bad effects that it generated. Thus Bharatendu attacked the hypocrisy o f the brahmanical society in his plays like Vaidki Hinsa Hinsa na Bhavati and Deval attacked the prac­ tice of marrying off young girls to elderly men in his Sarada. In short, theatre became a vehicle through which the m odern Indian discovered his self, his tradition, philosophical positions and also the political and philosophical m eaning o f existence. In addition, ‘m o d ern ’ theatre helped (decades before the Sangeet Natak Akademi was born) the traditional forms to survive. Ju st as m odern industry ruined the indigenous handicrafts in o u r coun­ try, m odern theatre and, later, cinem^ could have done th e same. But that did not happen. In terms o f music, acting styles, content, amalgamation of different forms and variety o f concerns— social, political and philosophical—o f the playwrights, m odem Indian dram a came o f age in the twentieth century. T he active dram a movements, at least in some parts o f the country, were also a func­ tion o f the assertion of identity o f those people—w h eth er in Bengal o r M aharashtra or Kerala. 4 Assertion o f identity and retrieval o f a cultural tradition are best exemplified by the popularity and spread o f H industani (north Indian) classical music outside n orth India where gharanas (schools) o f H industani music are based. This is not to say that H industani music was not already popular in outlying areas like M aharashtra or Bengal. Indeed, the Peshwa court in Pune patro n ­ ized visiting vocal classical singers from n orth India in the eigh­ teenth century. What happened in the nineteenth century was that we now had major practitioners o f music, i.e. vocalists and instrumentalists, emerging in areas like M aharashtra and Bengal.

dialectics o f defeat / 29

In the case o f M aharashtra this is particularly notable. Gwalior, in n o rth India, hom e of one o f the gharanas o f H industani music, was ru le d by a M aratha family. Yet, prior to the nineteenth century we d o not hear of any significant Maharashtrian pandit o f music. The tradition of Pune-based musicians begins with the nineteenth cen­ tury. (This would be true of almost all provinces where H industani m usic is popular, namely Bengal, Gujarat, Orissa and Assam. We see, even in these provinces, m ajor names in H industani classical music em erging in the nineteenth century and after.) T he popu­ larity has, if anything, increased in the twentieth century. K. L. Bhole, m ajor historian o f music and music director o f the Prabhat Film Company in the thirties and forties, has recorded that in the late nineteenth century three outstanding names em erged on the M aharashtra musical scene: Balkrishna Buwa Ichalkaranjikar, Ramakrishnabuwa Vaze and Bhaskarbuwa Bakhle.31 All o f them h a d been to the north and spent several years learning music.. T hey did m ore than anyone else to popularize H industani classi­ cal music in M aharashtra. Legend has it that Pandit Bhatkhande, w ho m ade the first attem pt to transform the essentially oral tradi­ tion o f music into a written one, was once asked why he was ‘writ­ in g ’ the music down. His reply among other things illustrates the p o in t m ade above: ‘M aharashtra does not have m uch of art. I th o u g h t it should at least have science!’ A popular theatre form in M aharashtra was the Tamasha in which the singing depended upon a lyrical form called the lavani. Peshwa Bahirao II encouraged a new form o f lavani which was (like the khayal gayaki o f the north) sung not in a Tamasha but at the court o r sung sitting, unlike the traditional one accom panied by dance. Honaji Bala was the poet who wrote this kind o f lavani which, however, in formal terms, did n ot sever its connection with l th e m ainstream lavani. In other words, M aharashtra seems to have tu rn e d in a significant m easure to practising H industani music in th e colonial age. By and large, it would be true to say that it was at this time that classical H industani music became really popular in term s o f the num ber o f its practitioners outside of north India. I have always w ondered why this was so. O ne possible explanation

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could be that although there is a wide variety o f art forms a n d rich classical traditions in precapitalist societies like India, th e s e are essentially local in character. If you wanted to study the m u sic of the Agra or Gwalior gharana, you had actually to travel th ere. Classical musicians did travel but the musical traditions did n o t. It was a bit like localized commodity production. T he gharanas m a n ­ aged to retain their purity by resisting em igration. With th e new political set-up this tradition broke down. 1he three masters, a b o u t who Bhole wrote, came back to M aharashtra and with them b eg an the chapter of Hindustani classical music that the h isto ry of M aharashtra had hitherto lacked. T he new socio-economic o rd e r th at colonialism sought to create in the whole o f India is partly responsible for this. Secondly, in M aharashtra at any rate, the elite had ju s t lost political power. In 1818, Pune fell to the British. The Pune b rah ­ m ans now had to assert their identity in some area other th an pol­ itics. They turned to culture as a m eans of doing so. Traditionally, they had, in any case, been the intellectuals. It was not altogether unknown for them to turn away from brahm anical functions. Q uite a num ber of them were landlords and, as such, capable of patronizing art at the local level. T he dom inance o f landlords and absentee landlords in the sphere o f arts and aesthetics is p ard y to be attributed to their being a leisure class of a kind. It is n o t an accident that the smaller states of the Deccan (allowed to survive by the British) became major centres of musical activity. For exam ple, Miraj became a centre of musical instrum ents.32 In the tw entieth century, Miraj was famous not only for the sitars it m anufactured but also because it was the hom e o f Abdul Karim Khan, the m ost well-known vocalist o f the Kirana gharana. It does seem that the spread and popularity o f H industani classical music in the nineteenth century (in o u r century it has, if anything, grown) were a function o f this assertion of the Indian cultural identity. A demoralized people who bad l°sl political power was trying to define itself, seek fulfillment for itself in the manifest excellence uf Hie Indian musical U'adilion and diis, under­

d i a l e c t i c s o f d e f e a t / 31

standably, went hand in hand with the more general search for the m eaning o f India and the Indian tradition. Colonialism and the opposition to it revealed the metaphysics o f Indian music. The m o st notable example in term s of this quest and its fulfilm ent in m usic is the experim entation that Rabindranath Tagore did with th e ragas resulting in Rabindrasangeet. This is not the place to go in to the m eaning and im portance o f Rabindrasangeet. N or is the p resent w riter com petent to do so. T here seems little doubt, how­ ever, that there is perhaps no better example of m odern India com ing to terms with the classical tradition not merely in terms of its technical details but also in term s o f retrieving the philosophi­ cal and aesthetic world of that tradition. Imperialism forces you to take a look at yourself, to redefine yourself. T he aesthetic pursuits of colonized people are for that rea­ son the most fascinating. The aesthetics of music is by its nature resistant to systematic articulation. Indian music has yet to find its Adorno. In any case, what Adorno says might be of interest here. He talks o f open forms in music. In the Western tradition he thinks the developm ent of the ‘open form ’ has gone through two stages. Now th e Indian musical tradition is essentially one of open forms. The ragas encourage an extraordinary degree o f improvisation or even o f ‘vagueness and oscillations’, to borrow A dorno’s description of th e Motzartian Rondo. I do not mean to suggest that A dorno’s account is useful for understanding the developments in Indian music. Reference to his work has been made just to point out that the practitioners of music during colonial times did in fact show ‘the intuitive sense of form ’ (Formgefuhi) that Adorno sees in Bach.33 Tagore’s Rabindrasangeet shows us so. T he less well-known and, at times, unduly criticized if not actually m aligned formal experim entation in music was the Natyasangeet in Marathi, an adaptation of the classical vocal tradition for use in theatre. D uring its best period, i.e. from 1880 to 1920, the raga form underw ent an aesthetically magnificent change. T he raga structure was made to look like a Japanese Bonsai tree. A Natyageet (the lyric in the musical) demonstrated all the features

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o f a raga in encapsulated form; it was raga music ren d ered self­ consciously in a theatrical form. Bal Gandharva, easily th e greatest singer-actor Indian theatre has produced, had the intuidve sense o f form (Formgefuhi) referred to earlier. Kumar G andharva, the well-known and the most creative of the contem porary vocalists, paid tribute to the master by recording a disc o f his ren d erin g s of the m aster’s songs. T he disc had an apt tide: Mala Umajlele Bal Gandharva (‘Bal Gandharva as I understand him ’). C o m e the twenties and the early creativity o f Natyasangeet disappears. Most o f the latter-day singers treat Natyasangeet m ore as an abridged version o f the raga rather than as a form in its own right. It is per­ haps no coincidence that Bal G andharva was his adopted nam e, given to him by no less a person than Lokmanya Tilak—a typical exam ple o f the close link between the nationalist m ovem ent and the arts. T he full significance o f Natyasangeet cannot be u n d e r­ stood unless one places it against the backdrop of the colonial experience and the search for m ore m eaningful art forms th a t the experience seems to have entailed. The most obvious change that colonialism m ade to our musical taste consisted in the introduction of the gram ophone reco rd . It brought Indians face to face of, shall we say, ear to ear with a r t in what Walter Benjamin has called ‘the age of mechanical rep ro d u c­ tion’. It is a m atter of considerable debate w hether this business of ‘mechanical reproduction’ is altogether a good thing. We n e e d not go into that here except to say that disc music went into the fa r cor­ ners of India in a way in which it had not gone before. Besides, this must have been a unique experience for the average Indian who could now own music. He had owned books. He had owned p o r­ traits and paintings. He had owned craft objects. He had never owned music until now. It would be difficult to describe it b u t a change came over the ‘traditional’ attitude to music according to which music was played either in a temple or in the court o f a king o r o f a zamindar or in the chambers of courtesans in urban centres. Now it entered the living room. In a caste-based society like India’s, this has had trem endous social significance. It would be a permissi­

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ble overstatement that the interface between Indian sensibility and colonialism gave the musician the kind of social respectability which he did not and could not possess for at least a thousand years. In a sense, the dark ages were over for him.

This survey has been rather sketchy and manifestly inadequate. But it gives us some idea o f our aesthetic experience during colo­ nial dmes. We need a theoretical perspective which will bring together, in a systematic way, the aspects m entioned so far. Amilcar Cabral has written in a consistent m anner on colonialism and cul­ ture. His insight—that ‘national liberation’ is ‘necessarily a cul­ tural act’54— is m ore than borne out by my essay. But his theories cannot be entirely applicable to the situation of colonial India. He had Africa and Portuguese colonialism in m ind andcharacterized the African situation thus: O ne o f the gravest errors, if not the worst, com m itted by th e colonial powers in Africa was to have ignored or underestim ated the cultural strength of African peoples. This attitude was particularly blatant in the case o f the Portuguese colonial dom ination which not only categori­ cally denied the existence o f African cultural values . . . bu t also stubbornly refused to allow any political freedom o f expression.35 It is easy to see that the description would apply to the colonies of Portugal or France. The nature o f the British colonial state was dif­ ferent. Further, unlike in French and Portuguese colonies in Africa o r the Carribbean, India had a flourishing indigenous lin­ guistic and literary tradition. T here was no question, as M adhusudan D utt’s example demonstrates, o f Indian writers becom ing, in the main, writers in English. For, a writer in colonial India was n o t faced with the problem which, for example, Aimé Céssaire was:

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. . . for me French was a tool that I wanted to use in devel­ oping a new means o f expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black Frenchy that, while still being French, had a black character.36 Tagore o r Khadilkar o r Prem chand was n o t creating a ‘brown* English. His tool was not and could n o t have been English. H e \*as an inheritor o f a classical literary and musical tradition. T h is is an im portant difference. Nor would it be historically a c c u ra te to suggest that the West denied the existence o f Indian (or, fo r that matter, Chinese) cultural values. It was interested in reducing those values to a secondary position. These differences, namely, an existence of.fairly old literary and linguistic traditions a n d the inheritance o f a classical tradition in the arts make the In d ia n sit­ uation very different. I do not mean to say the things In d ia n were superior to things African, ju st to suggest th at they were d ifferen t Colonialism in cultural terms was like a period of disturbed sleep for the ancient Indian people. They lost some, they gained some. Colonialism has been a mixed experience as m uch in the cultural sphere as in the spheres o f economy and polity. In India, the defeat at the hands of colonialism has had a dialectics o f its own. It resulted in the suppression o f the Indian people. A t the same time and because of it, it led to the retrieval of cultural classi­ cal traditions and languages. That, in sum, was our colonial aes­ thetic experience which was also an anti-colonial aesthetic experience. First published in Economic and Political Weekly, 12 December 1987

Notes An earlier draft of this paper was presented in Leningrad in August 1987 at the Joint Indo-Soviet Seminar organized by the Oriental Institute in Moscow and the Nehru Museum and Library. My thanks are due to Ram Bapat, Prabhat Patnaik, C. P. Chandrasekhar, Anil Bhatti, Utsa Patnaik and Gyanendra Pande who commented upon the earlier draft. Needless to say I alone am responsible for the views expressed in the paper or such errors and mistakes as there might be in it

dialectics of defeat / 35

1 Perry Anderson, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, eds., Towards Socialism (London, 1965), p. 225. 2 D. V. Potdar, Marathi Gadyacha Ingraji Avatara (‘The English Incarnation of Marathi Prose’; in Marathi), (Pune, n.d.). 3 Cited in Nihar Ranjan Ray, Krsti, Culture evam Sanskrit' in Prabhakar Machwe, ed., Bharatiya Sanskriti (in Hindi), (Calcutta, 1983), p. 18. 4 Suniti Kumar Chatteiji, ‘Sanskrit, Silpa, Itihasa, Jijnasa’ (in Bangla) cited in Nihar Ranjan Ray, ibid., p. 1. 5 Ibid., p. 7. 6 Ronald Stuart McGregor, ‘Hindi Literature of the 19th Century’, FACS. 2 in Hindi Literature of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Wiesbaden, 1974), v o l . 8, p. 63. 7 Cited in J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature (London, 1949), p. 102. 8 Ghosh, ibid., p. 107. 9 This is Ghosh’s description of Rammohun Roy, ibid. 10 Karl Mannheim, Diagnosis of our Times (London, 1962), p. 1. H R - O ’H anlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology (Cam bridge, 1985). S ec h e r summary and analysis of Phule’s play Tritiya Ratna (‘Third Jewel’), p. 122. 12 Collected Works of MahatmaJotirao Phule (in Marathi), (Bombay, 1991). 13 Madhusudan Dutt’s letter to his friend Rajnarayan Bose, cited by Ghosh, op. ciL, p. 138. 14 Warren Hastings, ‘Letter to Nathaniel Smith’ in P. J. Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 184-191. 15 Cited in Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience (Oxford, 1984), VOL. 1, p. 52. 16 See his five essays on the subject in G. G. Agarkar Nibandha Sangraha (‘Collected Essays’; in Marathi) in M. D. Altekar, ed., Sampuma Agarkar (‘Collected Works of Agarkar’; in Marathi), (Pune, 1940), v o l . 3, p p . 95-124. 17 Gay, op. cit, p. 32. 18 Ibid.» p. 43. 19 Ibid., p. 60. Gay used the term ‘renascent mysticism’. However in the translation edited by Steven Lukes (London, 1962), the words are ‘resurgent mysticism’. See p. 33. 20 Cited in Dominik La Capra, History and Criticism (London, 1985), p. 125. 21 Ibid., p. 115.

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22 Rajwade Lekhasangraha (‘Selected Essays of V. K. Rajwade’; in Marathi), (New Delhi, 1967, second edition), pp. 266-77. 23 T. V. Sardesmukh, Andhar Yatra (in Marathi), (Bombay, n.d.). Sardesmukh certainly argues that the images of darkness were the high point in that poetry. 24 Rahul Sankrityayan, ‘Bharatendu aur Pushkin’ in RahulSankrityayan he Srestha Nibandh (in Hindi), (New Delhi, 1982), pp. 124-129. 25 See Sukumar Sen, History of Bengali Literature (New Delhi, 1960), p. 191. 26 Ibid.. p. 185. 27jambhekar’s article welcoming the Hindu nataksala (drama company) appeared in Darpana on 17 February 1832. For the text of the article, see G. G. Jambhekar, ed., Memoirs and Writings of Acharya Baisastri Jambhekar (1812-1846), (Pune, 1950), v o l . 2, p. 27. 28 McGregor, Hindi Literature, p. 73. 29 P. G. Sahasrabiiddhe, Maharashtra Sanskriti (Pune, 1979), p. 801. 30 Cited by McGregor, Hindi Literature, p. 68. 31 Ichalkaranjikar also started SangitDarpan in 1883, a Marathi journal on music, perhaps the first in India. 32 Unfortunately, I was not able to locate any account which traces the history of the centres of production of musical instruments. It would be interesting to find out when Miraj, a small and dusty town at the southernmost tip of Maharashtra, started producing sitars. Peter Gay mentions (op. cit. p. 28) how, in 1884, the English peri­ odical Musical Opinion reported that Germany (in that year) could boast of approximately 424 factories turning out about 73,000 pianos a year. It is a pity that such data was not available for new or old centres of production of musical instruments in India. 33 T. W. Adorno, The Aesthetic Theory (London, 1984), pp. 313, 314. 34 Amilcar Cabral: Unité et Lutte I, p. 44 in Patrick Chabal, Amilcar Cabrat Revolutionary Leadership and People s War (Cambridge, 1983), p. 183. 35 Cabral, ibid., p. 43, cited in Chabal, ibid. 36 Aimé Céssaire’s interview with the Haitian poet Rene Depestre at the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1967 in Aimé Céssaire: Discourse on Colonialism (New York, 1972).

' The K i n g d o m e o f D a r k n e s s * or T h e P r obl e m o f C u l t u r e Close to half a century ago Maurice Dobb wrote an essay on ‘capi­ talism ' which has becom e quite a classic. T he opening sentences o f th e essay read as follows: It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the term Capitalism . . . should have been used so variously, and that there should have been ‘no common measure’ of agree­ m ent in its use. What is more remarkable is that in eco­ nomic theory, as this has been expounded by the tradition­ al schools, the term should have appeared so rarely, if at all.1 Almost the same words can be used about Bharatiya sanskriti (Indian culture). The traditional schools of thought in India do not use the term at all. T here was a famous book by Sane Guruji o f the sam e nam e.2 But even that book was m ore an attem pt to refute the distortions of Hinduism and Indian culture that the H indu nationalists were trying to popularize in the late 1930s and early 1940s. T hus the H indu nationalist Savarkar’s view o f Indian cul­ tu re an d the view o f a G andhian like the late Sane were as dif­ feren t from each other as can be. Perhaps Savarkar does not offer the best comparative paradigm. There would be any num ber of H in d u nationalists who would have very little to do with Savarkar’s world-view. T heir favourite would be Vivekananda.3 O ne can go on citing examples o f this kind. T he point is: what is Bharatiya san­ skriti and, m ore particularly, what m eaning and significance does o n e attribute to the term Hindu? Scarcely an easy question to answer. This is n o t to suggest that there is no such thing as H induism o r H indu. To be sure there is, except that it is not easy to describe, let alone define. This is further complicated by the fact that in m ost Indian lan­ guages there does n o t exist a term for culture which predates the colonial period. Even the word sanskriti is a coinage and that too of

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a fairly recently vintage. In Bengali, the term kristi (like bildung in German) was popular for a while and, as discussed in an earlier essay, we learn from Suniti Kumar Chatteiji’s account th at it was at Tagore’s initiative that the term sanskriti was preferred a n d cam e to stay in Bangla as the standard word for culture. In many languages (Marathi, for example) no clear distinction is made between culture and civilization in terms of the use of separate words for b o th . More often than not, sanskriti serves the purpose and it is die context which makes it clear if culture or civilization is being referred to.

1 It is obvious that this does not and cannot mean that th ere was no culture. After all, even in English, the usage is n o t very old. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the word to 1483. But it was then employed to mean ‘worship: reverential hom age’ and so o n . The first major work in which the term culture in its m odem sense is employed is Hobbes’ leviathan (1651). Hobbes talks o f ‘th e educa­ tion of children’ being ‘a culture of their minds’. This obviously comes from the Latin cultura which m eant cultivation, ten d in g , in Christian authors. Hobbes, however, takes the notion a few steps for­ ward. The point is that culture as a secular category em erges even in Europe only in the seventeenth century. This has to b e also understood in conjunction with Kantian and Hegelian th o u g h t Kant, through his three critiques, made it easy to establish aesthet­ ics and therefore culture as an autonom ous category. On th e other hand, with Hegel, as Marcuse has pointed out, \ .. history n o longer rem ained a process confined to one region . . .M To b e sure, Marcuse is talking here of the regions of spirit and of nature (in his discussion of Dilthey’s analysis of Hegel), but the statem ent is true also in a more primary sense inasmuch as with Hegel ‘history’ becomes a universal category going beyond regions. In sh o rt, with Hegel we have ‘world history’ for the first time. With Hegel, history emerges as a singular noun. ‘History’ takes the place of histories. It would seem that the process o f a growing consciousness of culturc has taken a different, almost opposite, course, tn precolo­

the problem o f c u lt u r e / 3 9

nial times, as we have seen, culture as a term did not exist in most Indian languages. Everything was dharma. It has become a cliché in contem porary discussions that dharm a is not religion. If we had precolonial India in view, it would be right to argue that dharm a was inclusive of both ‘ritualistic’ or 'religious’ and secular elements. Thus yajanaand yajana (to perform rituals like puja and yajna and to officiate at these rituals as a priest) were the dharma of a brah­ man. But so were adhyayana and adhyapana (study and teaching). An actor had his dharma (so much so that in our times the terms karma and dharm a have been reviled in the Indian-language dis­ cussions of theatre. A late nineteenth-century or early twentiethcentury theatre hardly ever used these term s). This was no less true of the non-Hindus. Islam here had a distinct Indian character and it did n o t fight shy of accommodating elements from the other metaphysical or even secular traditions. This is particularly so in the fields o f culture, m ore specifically in music, dance and literature. Sometime in the nineteenth century the situation clearly starts changing. T he pace and timing o f change have varied in different parts o f India. But its overall thrust has been unmistak­ able. To begin with, dharm a began acquiring the characteristics o f religion as the term is normally understood. T he transform ation is still n o t complete. But the signs o f change are also clearly visi­ ble. ‘H induism ’ not only emerges as a fairly definable category, it also gets semitized in the process. With or without their knowledge, our leading figures of the time try to turn the religious system of India into what could be described in Weberian terminology as ‘rational’, i.e. disciplined or organized religion. O ne sees this change coming across the board as it were. Indian Islam is increas­ ingly projected as totally unrelated to the mass of ‘H indus’ around i t It would not be very wrong to say that the Indian elite (both Hindu and Muslim) may shift from one civilization to two nation­ alities. T he Indian Marxists used this terminology m uch later. But their erroneous use o f this theory to understand the H induMuslim problem dem onstrated the divide that the elite was imposing upon itself over a century. The masses were dragged into it, continue being dragged into it. In backward societies (in partic­

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ular) this is inevitable. But they did not quite share this perception. This is dem onstrated by the poor response that the H indu Mahasabha and the Muslim League as political parties generally evoked among the followers o f the respective faiths. The masses suf­ fered the elite desire to destroy their culture silently. Perhaps a bet­ ter way of putting it is that they were reluctant victims of th e politi­ cization o f their faiths by the elites, both H indu and Muslim. 2

It is interesting to see the m anner in which this politicization took place and the general cultural significance o f that politicization. I will limit my com m ents to Hinduism because that is an area I know fairly well. But it would be a mistake to assume that the phenom enon being described h ere was lim ited to the H indus alone. Colonialism and early Indology planted several myths in the Indian mind. O ne o f them was the belief th at Aryans and Dravidians were, in fact, races. T he reality is that the terms can be conveniently used for classification of Indian languages. T h a t a given group o f languages presupposes a race speaking th o se lan­ guages has no scientific basis whatsoever. At any rate, w hatever ju s­ tification this belief might have had in the nineteenth century, today it has to be rejected as baseless and in c o rre c t T h ere is no race called the Aryan race. This is also true o f the so-called Dravidian race. T here are Dravidian languages. There is a g ro u p o f Indo-European languages. But the myth persists. So some people argue that it is a hoax p erp etrated by the Europeans about the Aryans coming to In d ia from elsewhere. Some others equally strongly reject this ‘revival­ ist’ or ‘chauvinistic’ position. It would n o t be easy to cite a n o th e r exam ple of a debate over the origins o f a non-existent p h e n o m e ­ non. In the last decades of the nineteenth and the early decades o f the twentieth century, debate served the purpose o f d efin in g ‘we’ in term s o f ‘the other’. Very few people thought o f w h eth er the debate was legitimate at all. By now, however, it has got so total­ ly confused that one does not know if the people o f India would ever be able to get out o f the clutches of the non-existent Aryan-

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D ravidian divide. The reason why the myth persists or will persist is probably the fact that in a caste-society all categories o f discrimi­ n a tio n are easily accepted and legitimized. The early Indological research fuelled this extraordinary race m yth. European Romanticism, especially German Romanticism, c re a te d a view o f an Aryan race and an Aryan India. In classical Sanskrit, the word arya is never used in the sense o f race. But the m y th persisted. Along with it was bo rn the myth o f a superior civilization o f a superior people. All ancient civilizations have en tertain ed the idea of superiority. It was true of the Greeks and Rom ans. It was also true of the Chinese. T he difference, in the case o f India, consisted in the fact that a colonized or rather van­ quished people needed that myth not so much as a view of ‘the o th e r ’ but as one o f the ‘sources o f the se lf.5 The ideas o f and a b o u t India generated by European Romanticism became a major constituting elem ent o f the Indian personality. We live in times w hen, am ong the English-speaking liberals o f India, at least an articulate section o f them , the idea o f India itself has probably becom e questionable. It is not easy, therefore, to see the force of these ideas or that the appeal o f the idea of India exists rather strongly for the not-so-enlightened people o f this country. Since th e liberals have lost interest in it, other forces have em erged as th e sole repository o r exponent o f the idea o f India. Let us return to the phenom enon o f the nineteenth century alluded to above. It was a grand imitation project—imitation of alleged o r real characteristics of the British who had subjugated us. It was thought that one o f the secrets o f their triumph was the organized, disciplined character of their faith. This was never quite articulated in these terms but if one looks closely at what was done to Hinduism in the nineteenth century, one can see this imitation vividly. T here are other reasons too. Let me illustrate the point in the context o f western India. Catholicism had come to western India in the sixteenth century. But it had rem ained an exclusive sect with little o r no interaction with the Hindus. There were conver­ sions, of course, but the world o f ideas o f Hinduism was largely unaf­

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fected by them. The non-Catholic Christianity, which came to west­ ern India later, was not so passive. It began an active interaction with the Hindus and in the pages of Dnyanodaya, the Christian weekly originally published from Ahmednagar and later, from Bombay, there was a vigorous questioning of Hinduism, Hindu society and Hindu metaphysics. Not that all that was said was very m eaningful. A lot o f what it had to say was based on ignorance of the texts and prejudice. Nevertheless, it generated a debate among th e liberal Hindus, making them take a fresh look at the state o f (western Indian) Hindu society of the time. It also generated a peculiar, dis­ tant admiration for Christianity. Witness Jotiba Phule’s fam ous play Tritiya Ratna .6 His term for God— nirmeek—was a clear borrowing from the Christian tradition. So was the Indian trinity—the Sanskrit coinage of Satyam Shivam Sundaram (The Truth, the Auspicious and the Beautiful), to cite just one example from Bengal.7 The Prarthana Samaj was influenced by the Brahmo Samaj of Bengal, but both in turn were influenced by the Church. T hey start­ ed the practice o f weekly prayer-congregations and even sermons. Paradoxically, all these imitations of Christianity and the rather brutal attacks on the H indu way o f life carried on by jo u rn a ls like Dnyanodaya stimulated the process o f liberalization and refo rm in Hinduism. W ithout any conscious design or even a fleeting aware­ ness of the consequences o f the positions they were taking, the nineteenth-century (non-Catholic) Christians had contributed to a ‘reform ation’ of a kind o f Hinduism.

This ‘reform ation’ had many aspects, but perhaps the most im por­ tant was fashioning Hinduism after Christianity. T he Christians had a book. T he Hindus needed one. T he Bhagwad Gita has always been an im portant text inasmuch as it was a p art o f the three main sources of H indu metaphysics (along with the Upanishads a n d the Brahma Sutras; all three together known as prasthanatrayi: the three ways to salvation). But in the nineteenth century and, o f course, well into the twentieth, the text o f the Gita acquires a status o f ‘the Book’, as the term is normally understood in the Semitic religions.

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T h e Hindus had finally found their book. A num ber of nationalists lik e Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh, Vivekananda, Gandhi a n d even Vinoba Bhave have written commentaries on the Gita. •This connection between the ‘H indu’ texts and o ur nationalist lead­ e rs had been interpreted by many as an attem pt to use ‘H indu’ sym­ b o ls and texts for nationalist mobilization. Tilak’s attem pt at launch­ in g a sarvajanik Ganeshotsav (public festival o f Ganesha) has also b e e n interpreted in similar terms. It would seem, however, that these were imitations o f Christianity in terms of creating a book and creating a collective festival, like a carnival.8 In other words, these attem pts were m ore Christian than Hindu; at any rate m ore imita­ tive than authentic ‘H indu’ if the dharma shastras (sacred scriptures) a re anything to go by. This ‘organization’ of an open-minded and even disorganized H in d u system was bound to result in the emergence of a new view o f Hinduism and, therefore, of culture. The Satyashodhak move­ m e n t of Fhule and the Prarthana Samaj of Ranade and Bhandarkar h a d gone back to the medieval Bhakti poetry for the sources of reli­ gion. The other went back to the brahmanical tradition. If the for­ m e r represented a revolt, the latter stood for a restoration o f the Vedic tradition. In the context of the nationalist struggle with its unmistakable anti-imperialist overtones, this restoration was not an undesirable thing in itself. To an extent it was inevitable. M odern Indian historiography has looked at this phenom enon in H indu and Muslim terms. The controversy over ‘Vande M ataram’ is the most glaring example. But, in the process, the aspect of imi­ tation of Christianity and Europe has been practically ignored. Acharya Javadekar, a thinker in the Gandhian-Marxian mould, has touched upon the metaphysical constituent o f the nationalism in Bengal. He called it bangalcha adhyatmik rashtravad in his brilliant book on m odern India first published in the late forties.9 In an ear­ lier book (published in 1940), he had traced the notion of meta­ physical nationalism (adhyatmik rashtravad) to Hegel.10 It seems to m e that all traditional historical analysis has failed to fully see the connections between European influence and the apparently meta­ physical expression that anti-imperialism had inevitably found in

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the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. This is the reason why Javdekar’s writing is im portant Unless one sees these connections it would n o t be possible to see continuities between Tilak and Vivekananda on the one side and G andhi on the other and to explain why all of them had written com m entaries on the Gita. With the decline of anti-imperialism and now its disappearance, it is inevitable that a distorted view o f nationalism and metaphysics should turn into revivalism. The forces which remained weak during the period o f the nationalist movement have now come to dom inate the scene. It was only a question o f time before the metaphysical nationalism and religiosity tu rn ed into fundam entalism and revivalism which is what has happened. W hen the Indian state can­ n o t and does n o t hold its own against the neo-colonialist onslaught, it creates a situation which is most appropriate to the talk o f banning books, destroying places o f worship like in Ayodhya and issuing fatwas to have people killed in the nam e of religion. Wilful destruction o f the economy also results in wilful or otherwise destruction o f culture. In a situation o f crisis, an insur­ m ountable one at that, it is n o t very difficult to u nderstand th at an average man may fear that but for his faith nothing else any longer belongs to him .11 T he professional community leaders th e n use this fear to usurp leadership and set into m otion a process of lum penization o f politics, econom y and culture. 4 In our situation, which does not obtain anywhere in the developing world, a unique phenom enon has been in operation. This p h en o m ­ enon relates to the decline of Indian languages. Way back in the twentieth century, there was a movem ent to defend and advance the cause o f Marathi in Maharashtra. O f course, this h ap p en ed in o th er language areas too. The Bhakti movem ent gave voice to the lowly of the lowliest in our society, an authentic voice o f selfexpression. We are witness in present-day India to a situation Of the near-planned cclipsc o f Indian languages. T here was a time when the Indian elite was bilingual—deeply rooted in its linguistic tradition but also familiar with the m odern European tradition.

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Now a typical m em ber o f the elite is vaguely familiar with Europe b u t knows probably next to nothing about his language; the literary a n d the cultural are thrown o u t o f the system because the system h as n o use for them . O n the other hand, the people who manage culture are less and less familiar with what constitutes culture. T he net result is that culture acquires and indeed has acquired in o u r society a necessarily negative meaning. Society gets divided into ‘we’ and ‘they’. So does culture. For a H indu, being anti-Islamic becom es the only m eaning of culture. It is the same with a Muslim. O u r culture has also suffered from the language of pluralism and composite culture. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, pluralism is in the last analysis a variety o f empiricism. And culture can never be understood in m ere empirical terms. You cannot really take a view of Indian culture as pluralistic or com pos­ ite without underlining the dividing line between the so-called H indu and the so-called Muslim culture. There is an Indian cul­ ture— music and literature being good examples—which everyone shares and makes richer. What is Hindu o r Muslim with the raagdar& You cannot reduce Indian culture to empirical categories. I am aware that ‘plural’ has been a necessary part of the secu­ lar discourse in our country. I submit that both empirical and deter­ ministic approaches to Indian culture have been destructive. They have assumed that there is no plurality within Hinduism or. within Indian Islam. Expressions like pluralistic tradition are a slightly sophisticated version o f the slogan: sarva dharma sama bhava (equal­ ity am ong faiths and sects) which outlives its use if ever it was useful, ju st as H indu metaphysics cannot be understood in terms of monotheism and polytheism. Indian culture cannot be understood in terms of a m ono or plural tradition. At any rate, the talk o f plu­ rality has only encouraged the talk of uniformity or vice versa, if you will. Whereas plurality is a myth which the secular discourse does n o t wish to abandon, uniformity is a myth the revivalist and funda­ mentalist discourse does not wish to discard. The truth of the mat­ ter is that Indian culture is an organic and historically determ ined unity which has escaped us over a period of time almost simultane­ ously with the slow but hopefully not yet certain destruction of India.

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It is n o t custom ary to hold the secularists responsible fo r this state o f affairs. Political parties like the Bharatiya Ja n a ta Party, the RSS or the Vishwa H indu Parishad talk of a pseudo-secularism . T h at argum ent n eed not be taken very seriously because any view which rejects a ‘uniform ' o r atem poral and ahistorical (th e word sanatana would m ean that) view o f Indian culture would be b ran d ­ ed by them as pseudo-secular. T he problem is n o t one of the correct use of the term: ‘secular’ was borrowed from the bourgeois philistines anyway. T he point simply is to identify the cultural cri­ sis of our time. N either the category o f plural or composite culture nor the category of uniform and sanatana culture would be very use­ ful in identifying and facing that cultural crisis. In other words, the Enlightenm ent project is still n o t over in our society. Neither the pre-m odern categories (of H indu and Muslim, etc.) n o r the post-modern categories (of rejecting the grand-narratives or theories in favour of fragments) will help that project. The alternative to enlightenm ent is darkness. In this situa­ tion, the task of the liberals and the left becomes doubly urgent, for they alone can handle the problem of culture. Following Walter Benjamin they alone can emphasize that all histories o f barbarism can give direction to the explorations in culture. It is for this reason that one has to identify the shortcomings o f the secular discourse. 1 cited Hobbes at the beginning of this paper. It might be worthwhile to conclude with another citation from him. T here is a section on ‘The Kingdome of Darkness’ in the Leviathan where he talks of forces very m uch comparable to what we have referred: . . . the Kingdome of Darkness . . . is nothing else but a Confederacy o f Deceivers, that to obtain dom inion over m en in this present world . . .12 T hat is what we are witness to. The problem of culture is the problem o f ‘the Kingdome of Darkness’ and of the ‘Confederacy of Deceivers’ w h o a r e o u t t o d e s tr o y n o t o n ly c u l t u r e b u t so c ie ty a s w e ll.

First published in Economic and Political Weekly, 16July 1994

the problem of culture / 47

Notes 1 Maurice Dobb,Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London, 1946). 2 P. S. Sane, popularly known as Sane Guruji, was a Gandhian thinker, nationalist leader and once a very popular novelist and poet in Marathi. The book that we allude to was also written in Marathi and was quite topical when it was first published in the forties inasmuch as it gave an alternative rendering of the Hindu world-view in polemical contrast to that of the Hindu nationalists. 3 This distinction is important because Savarkar had very little to do with Hindu metaphysics or theology. In contrast, for Vivekananda, nationalism became meaningful when and if it had adkyatmik (meta­ physical) content in it See also notes 7 and 8. 4 Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity (Cambridge, MA, 1987). See especially Chapter 26. 5 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. Making a Modem Identity (Cambridge, 1984). Taylor poses this problem mainly within the context of Western civilization. This short essay is an attempt at describing our modern identity and the way it was made. 6 Jotiba Phule (1827-90). A major social reformer who took the moder­ nity debate in India to the shudras. 7 See note 9. 8 To be sure Tilak did not refer to the carnival at all. But his main point was that the people should have a communitarian festival which would give them a sense of unity, of belonging, going beyond caste and class. The carnival does that for the Christians and Tilak could not have been unaware of it Yet I would agree that this is mere spec­ ulation, hopefully a plausible one. 9 Acharya Javdekar published a book in the late forties called Adhunik Bharat (‘Modern India’) which is a classic. This is the title of one of the chapters in the volume. 10 Acharya Javdekar. Adhumk Rajyamimansa (‘Modern Theories of State’, in Marathi), (Pune, 1940). This book also traced the European/Christian origins of the trinity of Satyam Shivam Sundaram. 11 I think Marx refers to the melancholy which colonialism pro­ vided in his India writings. But an even more relevant formulation would be that of the late Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist He says that under capitalism ‘along with God, nature is dying.’ See his The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), p. 71. His description would apply to the Third World with even greater poignancy. 12 Thomas Hobbes, in his famous Leviathan (first published in 1651), has a section on ‘The Kingdome of Darkness’. See pp. 331-384 of the Everyman’s Library Edition (London, 1975).

Th e O r d i n a r y a n d the E x t r a o r d i n a r y i n C r e a t i v i t y 1 You must all wonder what I am going to talk about. I am n o t sure if I know for certain. But then what does one do with certainly? I have no certainties to offer. More than a hundred years ago, Shaw once began a speech by saying that merely three words w o u ld be enough for the topic on which he was m eant to speak: ‘I d o n ’t know’. I find myself in a similar situation. W hat is o rd in a ry and extraordinary in the creative? I d o n ’t know. T hat would b e the right answer. However, according to our tradition, such a position m ay not be the only one conceivable or possible. Consider th£ following from the Kenopanishad naham manye suvedeti, no na vedeti veda cha yo nastad veda tad veda no na vedeti veda cha I do not think that I know it well, nor do I think that I do not know i t He who among us knows what is m eant by this, knows. It is neither a state of not knowing, nor o f knowing. O r consider another verse from the same text: yasyamatam tasya matam matam yasya na veda sah avijnatam vijnatatam vijnatamavijanatam To whomsoever it is not known, to him it is known. To whomsoever it is known, he does not know. It is not specif­ ically understood by those who specifically understand; it is specifically understood by those who do not specifically understand. You can now see how much dialectic there is in this tradition. Those who celebrate it do not know about it. T here could not have been a better forum than the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Lecture to rem ind them, and us, o f that dialectic.

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Anyway, to return to the peculiar relationship between ‘specifi­ cally knowing’ and ‘not understanding’, the position that Shaw took would probably n o t have been admitted as valid by o u r text which would have promptly posted a rejoinder: Shaw’s disclaimer actually underlines the fact that he specifically understands (vijnatam avijanatam). And, indeed, Shaw did; for he went ahead and delivered a witty and entertaining address. I cannot, of course, even pretend to match that wit and enter­ tain m en t Q uoting Shaw, or an ancient Sanskrit text for that matter, is easy. O ne must, however, see beyond these. We have to rem ember that this business o f knowing is itself dialectical, involving both the ordinary and the extraordinary. Both knowing and not knowing. Epistemology is as much about not knowing as knowing. Further caveats are in order here. To begin with, I am dis­ cussing a problem of literary creativity. I am not discussing arts like music or painting. I am talking of language. All of o u r discussion today relates to and derives its legitimacy from the realm of the autonom y o f the word. An obviously apocryphal but popular story ab o u t Sanskrit po et and playwright Kalidasa has it that Saraswati, Goddess o f Learning, once asked him: asti kaschit vagvilasah? ‘Do you have any excellence o f speech?’ (or, celebration o f language, if you will). That encounter turned him into a poet and he produced three long poems. O ne began with asti, the other with kaschit and th e third with vag. The ordinary Kalidasa became extraordinary. I refer to creativity in, and made possible within, language. T here is complexity built into all creativity but it can be mind-boggling in language. Think o f what Novalis said of Burke’s writing on the French Revolution when it was published in 1790: . . . many anti-revolutionary books have been written in favour o f the revolution. Burke, however, has written a rev­ olutionary book against the revolution. (Bluethenstaub I) I w onder if such a characterization of a musical concert would ever b e possible. Probably n o t It is possible in a literary discourse main­ ly because literary truth is always tendentious. In that tendentious­ ness it stands removed from concrete reality. Once, in a review o f a T urkish novel I read a line from that novel:

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I do not want to be a tree for dogs to piss on . ; . I w ant to be its meaning. T he tree wants to be its m eaning; a concrete reality aspiring to be its abstraction. This is possible because m eaning is never o n e . The word is a polyphonic phenom enon because it is tendentious. This tendentiousness forces you to rise from the abstract to th e con­ crete provided, o f course, you can o r you wish to. I speak o f 'Indian languages’. I do not speak o f In d ian s writ­ ing in English as recently celebrated and canonized in an elegant volume by Arvind Krishna M ehrotra. I refer to ‘Indians W riting in English’ in the way I presently will n o t because I have strong views on w hether o r n o t English is an Indian language; its status as an Indian or non-Indian language is n ot central to my argum ent. The relevant fact in terms o f my argum ent is that m ost ‘Indians Writing in English’ write mainly for the Western, i.e. non-Indian m ark et Think, for instance, of the opening paragraph o f The God o f Small Things (GOSTt which incidentally would qome fairly close to the word in my language, Marathi, for a story—goshth—b u t le t that pass). It begins with a description o f the h o t and h u m id May w eather in Kerala. Had this novel been written in Malayalam or Marathi or Bangla, I w onder if it would have carried this inform a­ tion? Probably not. This description o f May heat and th e south­ west monsoon could hardly have found a place in a desi o r native novel; it would be so patently redundant. H eat and hum idity are everyday facts and they would be narrated as such. In the case of GOST, its target-readership is unfam iliar with the weather a n d sea­ sons o f India. It certainly would know very litde, if anything, about hum id and sultry weather. Those who do n o t know heat, sweat and the monsoon m ust get the feel o f it all. GOST has many snippets of such information. A case o f good packaging. The target audi­ ence is happy because there are no clumsy and obscure details about distant lands and their too many people. I do n ot m e a n to suggest that all this happens because one writes in English. I t h ap ­ pens because o f the market. It is quite a com m entary on this writ­ ing that GOST was described as an example of rich ‘Indian writ­ ing’. You would rarely find a new or a first G erm an o r French or

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English novel described as a rich European novel. But this target audience has litde patience with the languages o f India, as these ‘Indians Writing in English’ themselves do! They find this category o f ‘Indian’ both good and convenient. It is almost a non-linguistic projection o f the so