World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama and Print Culture, 1790–1890 9789354356834, 9789354351730

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For my parents

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 0.1 Figure 0.2

Altekar Company wall poster, Example 1 Altekar Company wall poster, Example 2

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Figure 2.1 A manuscript copy of the beginning of Moropant’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode from the Mahabharat (1828) 88 Figure 2.2 Moropant’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode, the ‘Nalopākhyān’ from the Navnīt (1854)90 Figure 2.3 Headnote and introduction to Moropant, Navnīt (1873)91 Figure 2.4 Moropant’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode, the ‘Nalopākhyān’ from the Navnīt (1882) 92 Figure 2.5 Picture of Vishnudas Bhave taken from V.G. Bhave’s Vishnudas Caritra (date unknown) 96 Figure 2.6 ‘Indrajīt vadh and Sulocanā sahagaman’ from Bhave’s Nāṭya Kavitā Saṅgraha  103 Figure 2.7 Gopal Date as Sumersingh 106 Figure 3.1 Kanva blesses Shakuntala before she departs the hermitage131 Figure 3.2 Saṅgīt Śākuntal poster 139 Figure 3.3 Cast of Saṅgīt Saubhadra (1882) 143 Figure 3.4 Shahu I of Kolhapur, official portrait from 1912 143

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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION Throughout this book, I have used the Library of Congress romanisation and transliteration schema for Marathi with the following caveats. I transliterate the final anusvara with an ṁ rather than a tilde above the final vowel, and I have omitted internal anusvaras when they are not pronounced. For example, धां वुनि becomes dhāvuni and not dhā~vuni or dhāṁvuni. With scholarly prose, the issue of transliteration is less difficult than with poetry—and with the poetry that I translate throughout this book, I have attempted to transliterate in accordance with the pronunciation, taking into account the metrics. Naturally, this isn’t always possible with historical materials, nor with poets such as Moropant, whose work is heavily Sanskritised. On translation: all translations contained herein, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is my first academic monograph, and yet, it seems through conversations with colleagues and friends, I am indebted to more than a few people over the past ten years, from Pune to San Diego, and from my undergraduate days to my current professional life. Thank you, all. In graduate school, I wandered from postcolonial studies into the 18th and 19th centuries, and I could not have found more supportive advisors who guided me along a long, meandering intellectual journey. Thank you, Kathryn Shevelow, and thank you, Rosemary George. UC San Diego was a remarkable place—and I am grateful to many current, retired and departed faculty and staff whose words and feedback shaped this project in the long run. In particular, I would like to thank the late Marcel Hénaff, Nina Zhiri, Margaret Loose, Lisa Lampert Weissig and Seth Lerer: conversations with you have remained in the back of my mind as I conducted my research and wrote this book. Rob Melton, who was the humanities research librarian at Geisel Library, always found books to send my way, making research so much more fun and much easier too. Much of the research for this book took place in Mumbai and Pune, supported by a dean’s fellowship (thank you, again, Seth Lerer!), in small libraries and archives where I had chance meetings with persons who engaged with me sincerely and deeply. Rajeev Paranjape introduced me to the collections at the Bharat Natya Mandir Library and generously took me along to see saṅgīt nāṭaks performed by the Bharat Natya Mandir theatre troupe. Conversations with Rajeev kaka, as well as watching him help performers rehearse their music, provided me invaluable insight into the contemporary world of Marathi Saṅgīt Nāṭak, and also enabled me to understand performance history in a more complex and complete way. I would also like to thank the Pune Marathi Granthalay, the Pune Nagar Vachan Mandir, the Anandashram Samstha, and the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. In Mumbai, I spent considerable time at the Mumbai Marathi Granthalay in Naygaon as well as the Maharashtra State Archives in Elphinstone College. A special thanks to Mitali Taral at the former site, and Bhavana Bhalerao at the latter site. None of my Mumbai research would have been possible without the help of encouraging family, especially Rohit and Mugdha Deshpande, at whose house I stayed for nearly five months. Thank you! Academic work takes one along unforeseen routes to unexpected places—I would like to thank K. Sivaramakrishnan for hiring me at Yale xv

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Acknowledgements

back in 2013–2014, and guiding me through my postdoc year, and also for introducing me to Ayesha Ramachandran, who offered generous feedback on my book proposal, as did Katherine Bergren. Thank you also to Kasturi Gupta and Asiya Alam for endless conversations and dinners; and to David Brick for his delightful first-year Sanskrit class— definitely, the best language class I have ever taken. In Berlin, I’d like to thank Margrit Pernau, Ute Frevert, the Centre for the History of Emotions, and the library staff, especially Daniela Regel, for providing me with a stimulating work environment. In Berlin, Sonam Kachru brought the Kāvyaprakāśa to my attention, which eventually made its way into the first chapter of this book. I also had an office next door to Joel G. Lee, who is simply the best colleague and friend anyone could ask for. Imke Rajamani, Razak Khan, Deepra Dandekar, Torsten Tschacher and Tobias Becker all gave me valuable feedback on many chapters, and I felt very privileged and lucky to be their colleague. During my final year in Berlin, I shifted to the Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Centre (IRC) led by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Gabriele Brandstetter, Matthias Warstat and Christel Weiler. If there is a utopian space of cooperation still left in academia, then IRC embodied that, and the centre drew scholars from all corners of the globe, meeting them on their terms. At the IRC, I met Cody Poulton, James Harding, Anurima Banerjee, Balakrishnan Ananthakrishnan, meLê Yamomo, Jean Graham-Jones, and many others whose insight changed the way I thought about my own work. A special thanks to Astrid Schenka, Torsten Jost and Claudia Daseking for making my stay at the IRC very pleasant and productive In a strange twist of fate, this book brought me back to Pune, where I currently live and work, and I continued to benefit from conversations with persons I knew before, as well as new colleagues and friends at FLAME University. I’d like to thank Ashutosh Potdar, Prasad Pathak, and our library staff too: Prakash Rathod, Seema Dagade, Uma Dudhale and Aditi Chinchanikar. In the final stages, a few of my students rushed around Mumbai seeking permission for some of the images in this book: thank you, Aashna Jain, Prabha Kulkarni and Gayatri Nautiyal. Naturally, a whole world exists beyond FLAME, in Pune. I’d also like to thank Pushkar Sohoni for many nights conversing about books, music, art, literature and YouTube videos, and also Madhavi Kolatkar, whose wide-ranging Sanskrit tutorials always remind me just how enchanting the study of language is. For students and researchers of Maharashtra, the Maharashtra Studies Group is the place to be. It is a group of scholars who know the archives and the theory, and one is lucky to have their feedback. I’d like to thank the group as a whole, and also Prachi Deshpande, Christian

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Novetzke, Shreeyash Palshikar and Rachel Ball-Phillips, in particular, all of whom attended my talks and read drafts of various chapters. In the final stages of writing, Rahul Sarwate too provided generous feedback. Thank you all for your enthusiasm. Neilesh Bose has somehow managed to pop in and out of my academic life at pivotal moments of my career—in 2011, when I gave my first academic talk at a conference he organised, and then again in 2018 when I was completing the first half of this book. Neilesh invited me for a conference in Victoria, Canada (thank you Neilesh!), where I met Alexander Beecroft, who read a full draft of this book’s manuscript well before it was presentable and encouraged me on nonetheless: thank you. I’d also like to thank Anne Murphy and Sara Schneiderman for hosting me at the University of British Columbia to present part of this book’s argument as well. All in all, the south-western Canada tour was very inspiring. While academia has many problems, when I re-read the list of names above, it is apparent to me that academia also offers the satisfactions of intellectual exchange with colleagues and friends: each one of you has conversed with me meaningfully about ideas that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day. I am grateful for the coffees, the emails, the Facebook chats and posts, conference talks and detailed feedback I have received; without it all, this book would be a much poorer version of itself. I have heard so many horror stories about academic publishing— thankfully, my editor has ensured that this story is not one of them. Thank you, Chandra! My advisor once told me that most academic work is lonely, and we sit by ourselves in front of our computers and type, or we sit alone and read. Fortunately, I have been lucky to have had a supportive family that has pushed back against the feelings of isolation and endlessness that we often face when writing. My parents, to whom this book is dedicated, have been on call these many years, and my wife Lily has borne more than her share of arcana and minutiae about 19thcentury Maharashtra. I am indebted to your patience, humour and wit over these many years. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope I haven’t missed the mark when it comes to your own work! More recently, and unbeknownst to them, Felix and Ashok, our twin sons, have ensured that I work more efficiently and with greater focus so that I have more time with them later. If I have forgotten anybody, I hope, in a cosmic way, my thanks reach you too.

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INTRODUCTION The Archives against Theory: Language, Literature and Genre bhāūjīcā nirop gheūni gelā tīthe hiṇḍa-pirā koṅī jāgā na kaḷe āhe jāga kiṃwā nījasurā Taking Krishna’s message, he went wandering like a pir, Who knows where, whether awake or only wakeful? —Rām Jośī, ‘Subhadra’s Povāḍā The great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by the petty vicissitudes of stylistic modifications, which in their turn are linked with individual artists and artistic movements. For this reason, stylistics has been deprived of an authentic philosophical and sociological approach to its problems; it has become bogged down in stylistic trivia; it is not able to sense behind the individual and period-bound shifts the great and anonymous destinies of artistic discourse itself. —M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’

The poet journeys as an ascetic, a performer, a messenger and often a lover. He, in this case, discourses on spiritual life, preaches as a Sufi mystic and moves in worlds that are the stuff of dreams, blended with a reality of his liking. He takes Krishna’s message almost as an apostle while longing lovers await his return. When we approach him in the archive, we may find literature, performance, history, religion, travelogue or something else. There may be smatterings of philosophy, references to and advice about the mundane world of human relationships; elsewhere, we may find encomiums to patrons, memorialising their present grandeur and others eulogising past heroes and their deeds. And of course, various other poems are paeans to the Gods. Rām Jośī (1758–1812), the itinerant poet-performer from whose oeuvre the aforesaid verse is taken, was not unique in his poetic repertoire and practice: he was one among many 17th- and 18th-century Marathi-language poets who came to be known as people’s or popular poets in western India, arguably a class of organic intellectuals whose poetry registers as something more than ‘only’ literature: performed, 1

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embedded and situated in social life. Such poets were (and often still are) contrasted with scholar-poets and saint-poets in scholarship and the popular imagination.1 These three kinds of poets—popular, scholar and saint—composed nearly all varieties of what we may approximately consider ‘literature’ in the Marathi language before the 19th century with a few exceptions.2 By the late 18th century when the long durée covered in this book begins, the Marathi language had existed for nearly a millennium and its literature for approximately six centuries. Today, the geographical extent of the Marathi language roughly coincides with the state of Maharashtra in west-central India with small but dwindling pockets of Marathi speakers in the cities of Baroda, Gwalior, Indore and union territories such as Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and significant populations in the states of Goa and northern Karnataka. I would also be amiss to ignore the statistically small but sizeable Marathi-speaking diaspora in the US, which hosts a triannual convention specifically for Marathi culture. According to Ethnologue’s list of languages with over fifty million native speakers, Marathi is the eleventh-largest language worldwide by native speakers with only Bengali and Hindi counting more native speakers among Indian languages.3 With eighty-three million people using Marathi as their primary language, it certainly dwarfs native speakers of two languages that have traditionally defined the field of comparative literature: French and German. While neither the longevity of a language nor the size of its speaking community nor perhaps even statistics are necessarily reasons to study a language or its literature, they are often compelling reasons. Even though statistics remain problematic both for purposes of Marathi and (gasp!) the so-called national language of India, Hindi, they do provide points of departure.4 All aforementioned reasons are certainly stimulating enough to raise doubts about the kinds of histories we tell about the world, especially with regards to literature, language and culture; more so, since the goals of our academic disciplines are, in many ways, to describe the world normatively through particular disciplinary lenses. Surely a less distorted view than that offered through majoritarian languages is in order. During the period covered in this book, Marathi was not only a spoken language, nor only a literary one. It was also used as an administrative language in aristocratic courts flung far across northern India—from Baroda, Gwalior, Indore, Jhansi, to various locales as far south and east as Thanjavur and Arcot. Varanasi (Benares) too, contained a sizeable population of Marathi pandits, and the city was almost entirely built by the same late premodern5 Maratha state—a loose affiliation of various aristocratic houses to the Peshwa or chief minister of the descendants

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of Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsale (1627/30–1680)—whose many courts patronised the popular poets I wrote about before. How can the poetic history of the Marathi language be integrated into world literary histories? What can we gain by diverting our gaze from majoritarian languages? If we are to Forget English! as Aamir Mufti prompts us— then surely, we ought to remember something else, through a deep engagement with the archives.6 In diverting our scholarly gaze to Marathi, I ask us to remember a time when the narrative of capital had not yet turned ‘the violence of mercantilist trade, war, genocide, conquest and colonialism into a story of universal progress, development, modernization and freedom’ nor transformed ‘the provincial thought of Europe to universal philosophy’.7 By returning to that time, to better understand the kinds of intellectual exchange and theft that colonialism fomented, we gain an alternative vision of the ‘eurochronology’ problem—a mistaken perception of backwardness in the Global South—that has created a specious representation of theory, genre, and the transfer of ideas between colonial centres and peripheries the world over, and more significantly, vice versa. This book articulates two areas to bridge gaps between postcolonial, world, and comparative literature studies that address issues of eurochronology and literary history with regards to studies of majoritarian language literatures and ones such as Marathi language literature. In the first instance, I demonstrate how Marathi literature, like English literature, simultaneously became an object of study through various colonial interventions. The story of how English literature gained its curricular outlines within the colonial setting is well known—it was variously a way to demonstrate purported cultural superiority to create an intermediary class of Indians between the British and the native, and it was also, furthermore, a prime site of colonial exchange from the colonies back to the metropole in order to civilise the lower classes in England in ways that linked domestic programmes with imperial ones.8 But how then, did Indian literatures function? These too were reinvented through institutional changes in education, technological change, governmental transfer from a late premodern Maratha state to a colonial one and various other social factors. Collectively, the aforementioned processes transformed the sites of literary production and reception. While colonialism did indeed disrupt literary ecosystems the world over, classic work on postcolonial studies has rarely approached literatures beyond the English language,9 whereas some (relatively) more recent work on world literature surmises (how, and with what evidence, is unclear) that literature from Indian and other colonised locales only became visible within the

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world republic of letters after these locations achieved independence and become nations.10 By focusing on Marathi and the Mumbai–Pune (Bombay–Poona) nexus—a nexus that was neither an independent nation nor a monolingual entity—one is able to demonstrate just how important the colony was for literary practices globally. By the late 1860s, Bombay became the second-largest city in the British Empire as a mill town, a financial hub and a port city. Only London was larger. Corollary to all commercial activities, the Bombay–Poona nexus was a major site of literary ferment as well, playing host to many visiting overseas theatrical troupes while also nurturing its own distinctive literary culture through institutional and popular support.11 Its literary culture was a significant site of simultaneous colonial exchange, a small portion of which I examine in this book, especially with reference to Marathi and occasionally, Sanskrit. My second point, a fundamental ‘conjecture’ of sorts, is that we need to shed ‘literature’ of its association with what scholars of South Asia have dubbed ‘graphic’ literacy: the ability to read and write. Far from a given, reading and writing do not guarantee comprehension, and children often learn to write out words before they understand their meaning. Literacy does not start and end with the written word on the page and exists in many forms that enable successful transfers of knowledge— indeed graphic literacy may be more of an occasion to forget rather than remember. (And in our hypertextual age, all sundry forgotten materials are available for us to un-forget as we trawl through heaps of Benjamin’s civilisational garbage online.) I am not the only one to make this claim about theoretically unsustainable definitions of literature but there are also many who would like to problematically sustain literature as a dyad constituted through writing and reading.12 Must literature depend upon the primacy of textuality? This is certainly what David Damrosch implies in his focus on the world of the text, the author’s role, modes of reading and what is a novel.13 Clearly then, drama doesn’t count.14 Surely, if there is a political edge that eludes world literature or that world literature ought to consider, then the continued reliance on reading seems to be a significant site where politics and ethics can both be articulated.15 For this book, the performance—whether poetry or drama—supplants literature as a category of analysis through which a precolonial and colonial past can be made legible and seen within a discourse of world literature. Marathi, and a few other Indian languages, have concepts of ‘literature’ that are not always similar to our contemporary understanding, which are evident both in theory and semantics. With various African literatures too, a strong undercurrent of oral literature or orature is often used to support a genre such as the novel, giving the ‘African novel’ its

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unique characteristics.16 These theories and semantic properties, part of the critical apparatus of Indian languages, were utilised and inserted into a global zeitgeist for what literature was for much of the 19th to mid-20th century, especially via orientalist discourses on grammar and aesthetics. But unlike Damrosch’s stubborn textual definition of literature or Moretti’s dogged pursuit of the genre of the novel, the 19th century was one where poetry was literature, bar none, and Marathi and Indian theories of poetry had an impact on global literary culture that was second to none, despite the preponderance of poetry as a genre of performance. These theories relied not necessarily on pure orality, but one that saw orality as an ideal—heroic and virtuosic performance and the voice was preferred over moribund textuality.17 And while some of the poets I write about certainly used texts of their own composition, those texts rarely circulated to the lay public. The primary dyad that galvanised literary activity in the decades preceding colonial incursions, therefore, was not between author and reader, but between performers and spectators. What of literature’s graphic literacy then? And what is to be gained by obstinately policing literature as reading and writing? What the Marathi situation offers, instead, is a case whereby the singular is universalisable,18 so to speak, reframing world literature through implicit critiques of literacy—and shifting the focus to performance. In the pages that follow, I first elaborate on some of my favourite archival finds, working from singulars that have, in many ways, instigated this study and its larger theoretical orientations. I exposit theatrical wall posters—advertisements glued to walls—and the items they advertise. These theatrical wall posters, akin to others from elsewhere in the world, divulge a wealth of information: the material histories of performance (new literary technologies, economics of theatre) and social discourses (caste, prostitution, labour) that are especially important for Chapters 2 and 3. But no less important for this book, the wall posters allude to genre’s historicity, aesthetics, canonicity, as well as various performance traditions. And they do so in a way that allows us to reconstruct the entire programme from a night’s performance. Following this archivally rich feast, I revisit some of the major arguments in postcolonial and area-studies scholarship, about literature and literary study and also about the role of colonialism in constructing knowledge about other locales and our ability to see through colonialism’s discursive fog. Thirdly, I explain my own approach to the materials, drawn from more contemporary work in comparative and world literature studies, as well as, importantly, from Marathi scholarship. Finally, I offer an outline of this book, its chapters and their interventions. World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India is, ultimately, a book written with a singular aim in mind. It is what postcolonial literary studies should have

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been thirty years ago, an engagement with actual sites of the postcolony and their literary traditions, rather than what postcolonial studies became: an engagement with a thin crust of literary figures, (still) largely writing in English, French and majoritarian languages, and that too for audiences in the Global North, whose appetite almost exclusively for the novel form has been conditioned, rather solipsistically, by marketcreating institutions and academics. How different would postcolonial literary studies have been if, say, 30 per cent of Global North academics were working on Indian bhāśās? 50 per cent? More?

SINGULARITIES IN THE ARCHIVE Nowhere is there a clearer display of performance genres and their interrelated and layered historical pasts than on theatrical wall posters. Nowhere else can we see artistic discourse so flamboyantly displayed for public consumption, especially in ways that implicate new technologies and approaches that were part of a colonial zeitgeist. Nineteenthcentury theatrical wall posters that advertise upcoming productions depict permutations of genre, performance, poetry and the apparatus of print in ways that speak to both textual and performance cultures, in ways that upset the connections between the literary and literacy. ‘[F]or almost the entire history of theatre from the invention of printing until the end of the nineteenth century the playbill constituted a central point of articulation between theatres and their public spheres,’ writes Christopher Balme.19 He provides several examples and formats of playbills, from the 18th through the late 19th century, that showcase their transformations over time in German and English contexts.20 While print technology, if not paper, was a new import within the colonial ecumene, Indian theatrical wall posters evidently directly adapted 19th-century models.21 Such theatrical wall posters as one sees in Figure 0.1 (1873) and Figure 0.2 (1876) are ephemera par excellence that showcase the sedimented and multiple encounters between past and present, genre, style, theatre theory, aesthetics in Indian languages, a didactic and disciplinary discourse, gender, theatrical technology and the interaction of various institutional agents. Those provided below are from the Altekar Hindu Drama Company, one of over thirty-six theatre companies22 that punctuated the calendar in towns large and small and shaped a modernity in western India that held purchase on the popular imagination for several generations thereafter. Like many other companies, the Altekar Company seems to have been founded in one of the border cities/regions of present-day Maharashtra and Karnataka, a region whose multilingual (Kannaḍā,

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Marāṭhī and Koṅkaṇī) history has proven to be a fertile site of theatrical and other cultural endeavours such as Hindustani music. It is in such ‘multilingual local’ contexts that performative and textual elements were melded,23 instigating the performative transformations in a genre that is one of the foci of this book. That is, many of the performers were from multilingual communities themselves, and the emergence of this drama from cross-lingual shared traditions speaks to the avenues of intraIndian influence that I occasionally highlight in this book, especially in Chapter 5. From their incipience, these troupes traded in urban centres such as Mumbai, Pune, Dharwad, Belgaum, Thane and others, patterning their travels on those of the popular and scholar itinerant poets that preceded them. How did they recreate and incorporate such poetic pasts into their own work? How did performance genres change through theatrical activity and dramatic writing? Each wall poster shows such generic and theatrical traffic. Each poster is twenty by twenty-seven inches (20” × 27”)—large enough to be seen from a short distance—but less typographically busy than their English and German counterparts. The use of imagery, however, is distinct from the examples Balme provides—perhaps because graphic literacy itself was so low in colonial India. Printed at presses in Belgaum and Dharwad, these posters also implicate a growing print and publishing industry that was not only the domain of miscellanies and other general-interest magazines but also a competitive and vibrant one,24 encompassing a variety of commercial endeavours, especially including marketing—something I speak about a little more in Chapter 2. As ephemera, the playbills participated in an economy of enchanted industrial communications, in which travel and the power of print amplified the meanings and associations of stories.25 They are remarkable specimens designed to be captivating in their own ways. The imagery on the posters, for example, conveys a sense of narrative and significance with Sarasvati and Ganeśa in Figure 0.1, both of whom are associated with wisdom and storytelling in Hinduism. Figure 0.2 depicts the arched proscenium stage, under which most of the text is given. The stylisation of the columns and arch, however, indicate something of a hybrid design: the columns appear as many of the rock-cut-turned columns from Indian temples, while the palm fronds emerging from the top, adjacent to the arch itself, strike one as oddly out of place. The image of columns between which something takes place is a very different idiom from the depiction of Sarasvati and Ganeśa, and it speaks to some kind of infrastructure and understanding of a proscenium stage, carefully framed, and upon which something happens. But they are also specific to their performance venues. Figure 0.1 advertises its venue as a wāḍā—a

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large house or mansion with a central courtyard, akin to a havelī from further north, whereas Figure 0.2, with the arch, was to take place in the vidvajjan-manolhādak-thieṭar, literally ‘the theatre that pleases the minds of learned men’.

Figure 0.1: Altekar Company wall poster, Example 1 Courtesy: © Author, 2010.

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Translation of Figure 0.1: Altekar Hindu Drama Altekar Hindu Drama 15th performance a fun-filled night date: 23rd August year 1873 Saturday ākhyān Devendra vṛṣparva battle and vṛṣparva defeat, Śriyāḷa biography and The Death of Nārāyaṇa Rāo Peśve/in this, in the first part a sword fight will be shown. / in the second part, Cilhāḷa will be decapitated and his head and torso / will be shown. In the 3rd part, Nārāyaṇa Rāo’s stomach / will be torn and rice and sugar and innards will be vividly shown. There being four rasas herein, mourning rasa will be complete. / The farce will be miraculous at night. Place at Bāḷacārya Paṇḍit’s Vāḍā near the Pañca Kacerī Ticket prices Men

Rs

Fourth

First

1 Re. 8 annas (coach)

Women

Second 1 Re. (chair) Third

Lady

8 annas (crude bench)

8 annas

12 annas (bench) Nayakiṇīs and Kasbiṇīs 12 annas

Tickets can be purchased at the place of the play. The play will commence at 10.30 and end at 4 [am]. Those who quarrel about their tickets or are seated in a zone where tickets are more expensive than those purchased will be escorted out. Smoking is forbidden. Ticket prices will be adjusted accordingly. This advertisement has been printed at Mishrilal Ramprasad Missar’s Dyna. Bo. Chhap. Mu. Dharwad.

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Figure 0.2: Altekar Company wall poster, Example 2 Courtesy: © Author, 2010.

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Translation of Figure 0.2: Altekar Hindu Drama the theatre that pleases the minds of learned men come and see the performance The new Altekar Hindu Dramatic Co. Ticket Prices Men Women First 1 Re. (chair) Second 8 annas (bench) Lady 4 annas Third 6 paise (second floor) Fourth 4 paise (baiṭhak, tiles Nayakiṇīs 8 annas floor) and Kasbiṇīs Saturday date 8, month July 1876

babhruvāhanākhyān and a laughter-inducing farce from a woman’s biography A suggestion: In order to prevent spectators from staying up too late, the performance will begin at 9 and end at 2. Those conducting themselves rudely will be thrown out of the theatre without a refund. [Those] standing in the compound without a pass will be charged a second-class ticket and seated in fourth class. Special hint: There being new members in this company, they are proficient in every skill, language, oration and the warfare of many weapons. Similarly, the curtains, scenes, etc., have been improved so the spectator will feel extreme joy. Still, we are hopeful that these visiting members will receive respect and good support for their efforts from the polite gentlemen present. Those purchasing first- and second-class tickets will be given a handbill. Hi. Na. Ma.

Beḷgaum, Karnatak Vārttika Chā. Chā.

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Each site speaks to transitions between private and more public patronage, and both function as disciplining spaces. The spectators may read the fine print—or hear it read aloud, more likely—informing them about admission, segregated according to the price of admittance, the timings of the play and the behaviours deemed appropriate; the threat of disciplinary action reinforces all behaviours. It also describes the rasa-s (aestheticised emotions) of the play to be enacted, thereby guiding the spectator in softer forms of aesthetic disciplining or forms of connoisseurship, depending upon how one chooses to interpret it. Noteworthy with this and some later wall posters is the price of admission for women. Whereas men may belong to one of three socioeconomic categories, women have the option of only two—either family women or one of two kinds of performing women (kasbiṇī or nayakiṇī). By the late 1880s, both kinds of performing women had been re-classified as common prostitutes (veśyā) in wall posters that evince an entirely disenchanted aesthetic.26 These are all salient issues that are prominently visible on the wall posters above, as part of the superstructure of experience: what kind of theatre, where one sits within it, amongst whom and how one is expected to behave, and importantly, how one is meant to respond to the plays with what kind of aestheticised emotions. The aforementioned elements function in ways akin to practices of reading; they ask the spectator to behave in specific ways and orient him/her towards the performance, and explicitly make connections between genre and expected response. Reading over the plays mentioned reveals several overlapping and intersecting terminologies that describe the performance, often foregrounding a specific rasa. These include: a kheḷ, nāṭak, phārs, ākhyān and caritra. They refer to five kinds of performances to be enacted—a play, a drama, a farce, an epic story and roughly, a biographical account. From the contexts of performance, it is evident that these refer, roughly, to generic characterisations. Kheḷ, literally, ‘play’ more closely becomes ‘performance’—which is why the wall poster in Figure 0.1 states ‘kheḷ 15’, the 15th performance while Figure 0.2 mentions, ‘kheḷ yā āṇi pahā’, come and see the performance. This is consistent with usage that prevailed well into the late 20th century, where newspapers and other media would announce ‘nāṭakācā kheḷa’, the performance of a play. Whereas in more recent times the term ‘prayoga’, literally, ‘experiment’, has replaced kheḷ, the latter still remains resonant. In this sense, the Altekar Company is one that produces drama, nāṭak, but performance is a kheḷ. We also find ourselves confronting the latter three terms: phārs, ākhyān and caritra, farce, epic story and spiritual biography, each of which pertains to a long genealogy of performance, literature and

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genre. An ākhyān is most closely a story that is told in speech or song, and also the written form of that story.27 The genre became popular in the early 17th century, and was, from the beginning, associated with brahman pandits—the pandit-kavis or scholar poets I spoke about before.28 In this sense too, these wall posters, following a global trend, harnessed ‘cultural memory and novelty’ to sustain and transform genre and authorial attribution.29 I examine the practice of this poetry, its transferal to print, and its incorporation into drama in Chapters 2 and 4. It is unclear whether and how far back in time these genres recede. If we compare it to Sanskrit kāvya, then naturally the textual-performative doubling originates just before the common era.30 Commentators in the late first millennium, meanwhile, seem to have theorised the difference between a kathā, a fictional or invented story, and an ākhyāyikā or little ākhyān, a term designating autobiography and narratives from ‘actual experience’.31 The late premodern practitioners (such as Moropant of Chapter 4) were indeed versed in the Sanskrit epics, and it is likely they were at least tangentially aware of the generic predecessors to their own poetic practices. We must also confront the word caritra—the wanderings or doings of a person, his deeds, from the root √car, ‘move’. Now used for biography, past usage was imbued with a sense of spiritual biography or hagiography. One comes across the caritras of the gods, for example, whether Kṛṣṇa caritra or even missionary writings on Jesus’ caritra in the 19th century, in attempts to insert Jesus into a generic understanding common to large parts of India. While all genres here may not be immediately theorisable and recoverable, these wall posters signify, at the very least, a literary-performance culture in which these terminologies were known and used appropriately in order to revivify the past through the enchantment of industrial communication. Other elements of these wall posters convey an uncanny theatricality—and, I believe, invite us into that theatrical world beyond the enchantment of print. These theatrical elements are the varied plot, in which experiential and aestheticised emotionality take the lead, carrying on from late in the evening until the early hours of the morning. In reconstructing the night’s performance from Figure 0.1, we see that it begins with an ākhyān, detailing a battle and a vadh—a kind of divinely ordained defeat, not identical to murder, assassination or simple defeat. Following these two episodes, we come across a hagiography—caritra—of the legendary Rājā Śriyāḷ, followed by an episode about the death of Nārāyaṇ Rāo Peshwa, an 18th-century prime minister of the Maratha Empire. While the poster doesn’t tell us its genre, other sources confirm this as a farce—though a ‘farce’ was more akin to a ‘realistic’ play—an issue I consider in Chapter 5.32 This latter story is divided into three parts: a sword fight, then a decapitation

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followed by a disembowelling. How does one assemble such an episodic night into a unified whole? What is the spectator supposed to feel? How is s/he supposed to respond? Well, the wall posters tell us that too: There will be four rasas in it, including the tragic rasa (śokarasa).33 Presumably, the others include the vīrarasa (feeling of heroism) because of the vadh, bhakti rasa (feeling of devotion) for the hagiography and presumably the bibhatsa rasa (feeling of disgust/aversion) owing to the disembowelling. And then we read the more curious part of the wall poster. What does ‘There being four rasas herein, the tragic rasa will be accomplished? What does it mean to accomplish or complete the rasa-s? Similarly, the wall poster also reads, ‘If the night remains, the farce will become miraculous.’ The programme thus takes spectators on an emotional journey from start to finish without trying or attempting to ‘integrate’ the experience by privileging one rasa over all others. It is not a singular experience, but a varied one with many generic overlays and interruptions, each of which signifies differently. Genre adopts and adapts over time, and the ākhyāns given on the playbill-wall posters are not the same ākhyāns performed by travelling scholar poets—a topic covered in the second and fourth chapters. But the vocabulary used is the same, and it is legible to the knowing community of spectators and readers.

QUESTIONS OF COLONIAL MEDIATION, NATIVE AGENCY AND LITERARY ECOLOGIES Is it possible to work backwards in ways that recover the genre’s history and historicity from the epistemic violence of colonialism? The wall posters I analysed on the preceding pages prompt us to meditate on the way colonialism’s ‘forms of knowledge’ undeniably disrupted the fabric of colonised locales.34 These forms of knowledge recoded more indigenous forms over time, creating the perceived eurochronology that postcolonial study has inherited. Indeed, how are we to make those wall posters universalisable, especially when their singularity is so pronounced, seems to come from another, quaint world? First of all, we may do so by recognising that it doesn’t come from another world but is alive and part of a critical discourse within spheres of Marathi literary and theatrical criticism, as well as revealed in various gaps in postcolonial scholarship. For example, in her book on the English novel in colonial India, Priya Joshi mentions that Indians read widely, but consumed melodrama and other genres considered less high-brow in part, at least, because of the representational conventions of Indian epics.35 What, precisely, are we to understand from such statements? With the wall

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posters before as well as at various moments in Chapters 2–5, I expand Joshi’s observations by focusing on what kinds of theatrical and other epic entertainment people consumed. Much of what I do in this book is respond to Marathi and postcolonial criticism and build upon it. The first step, as I see it, is to rethink our ability to recover the historicity of genre and also the works of individual agents from the literary past as I do below. Finally, I offer a comment on how I see that colonial disruption, using some of the concepts of ‘ecology’ as theorised by Alexander Beecroft.36 Briefly, when concerning literature and the realm of Indian language culture, I see the disruption of colonialism as one that transformed Marathi literature from a panchoric into a vernacular ecology. Marathi literature, from one that functioned within a region of multiple power centres, roughly united through a common panchoric literature and language ecology, experienced a second vernacularisation as political structures became colonial, in relation to English and also Sanskrit.37 A large body of work approaches many concepts and their colonial entanglements in ways similar to mine, questioning our ability to recover and properly historicise such concepts as caste or gender or Sanskrit and other Indological and philological learning. At the heart of this research is the problem of mediation and whether we may or may not be capable after the intellectual and epistemic (in addition to many other kinds of far more violent) violence of colonialism, to recover rooted and situated knowledges about discursively rich topics in a meaningful way. Topics such as genre and aesthetics, for example, are especially pertinent to the wall posters before. The problem of colonial mediation has best been explored in studies on gender and sati—the practice of widow burning—which highlight mediation’s (and importantly, history’s) more extreme cases. With history and female subjectivity, archival limitations circumscribe the ability to find female subjectivity with clear boundaries.38 But surely literature and performance, conceptually, weren’t so discursively mediated as gender and perhaps also caste?39 Most of all, the proponents of the literature I write about were not from marginal castes, classes and gendered backgrounds. While some aspects of literary history were certainly part of the colonial enterprise, it remains in a relatively less mediate position than other colonially mediated categories. That is, literature and its agents were in a position of relative privilege, a privilege that enabled them to manoeuvre various aspects of the colonial bureaucracy as well as leave their comparatively less mediated voices in the colonial archive. Part of literature and performance’s relative accessibility in comparison with other categories owes to its principal agents and historical actors.

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Those who engaged in theoretical conversations about literature and debated the wide-ranging influence and impact of ideas from the global circuit were not subalterns, and definitely not subalterns in the sense that (many) women and lower castes were. While it is true that gender and caste are particularly dense, literature and literary history have demonstrably different actors, many of whom were associated with the literary and culturally elite circles of the erstwhile Peshwa and Maratha courts as is evident from the sources I present in many of the chapters that follow. Literature, in this sense, forms one aspect of language politics in colonial India, intersecting with simultaneous studies from overseas, and importantly, the Sanskrit-Indological nexus that exercised an influence not only on colonial policy40 but also a significant one on European linguistics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and even beyond. Why else would Will Ladislaw in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) diagnose his cousin Casaubon’s inability to find a ‘key to all mythologies’ as a failure to heed the ideas of German Orientalism? Some of these influences have been well documented. For example, the construction of verbs and words from their verbal roots, phonology and even Saussure’s structure of the sign has been shown to resemble theoretical conversations and observations from Sanskrit grammar.41 While these studies are well known in South Asian area-studies circles, it seems as though they remain something of a curiosity for other disciplines. A careful reading of Sheldon Pollock’s recent A Rasa Reader (2018; not Thomas Beebee’s flummoxed review) should alert us to the way conversations about performative language, reception of a literary text, affects and intensities, performance theory, among others, may be comparatively studied through the way Sanskrit aesthetics and grammar addressed many of the same fundamental questions raised in various 20th-century literary theories.42 To repeat, questions of literature, literary culture and history bound up within Orientalism and philology, debated by socially non-marginal groups, do not qualify as the quintessential subaltern domain. Its main agents were significantly involved in colonial life, leaving records and influencing policy. As Trautmann writes, …in other European countries (excluded from colonial rule of India by England’s monopoly) India was regarded as providing the most exciting of new problems, holding out the promise of new discoveries. The source of this intellectual effervescence was the new theory of language that arose from acquaintance with Sanskrit….

I write more about this in the following chapter, theorising the re-gift of theory from the colonised to the coloniser.

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At the same time, if persons of Sanskrit learning were involved in influencing colonial policy, what can we say about their agency? What avenues did my historical actors have to fashion their own identities and world? Some early scholarship on agency argues that the early colonial state was quite unsure of itself and relied heavily on native informants, whose collaboration was essential to the workings of colonialism.43 Intended, in some ways, as a rebuttal to Said’s all-encompassing agentless Orient that was created by the Western imagination, such studies had the unintended (or implicit) consequence of portraying the native as a collaborator in the colonial project. Other studies have suggested that Indians were able to carve out domains in which they could and did exercise agency largely outside the purview of the colonial state.44 A good overview of these debates can be found in Bhavani Raman’s Document Raj.45 ‘Resistance and collaboration, like domination and subordination or coercion and persuasion, constitute a tidy binary opposition…. But, despite their neatness and utility, resistance and collaboration do not exhaust the subject-positions that Indians occupy in nineteenth century print culture,’ writes Vinay Dharwadker.46 While individual persons, acting ‘independently’, are indeed parts of many of my chapters, my purpose here is not to review debates about agency within a colonial setting. There is a scholarly problem as well. ‘…[H]istorians do not agree about when and perhaps if colonialism effected major transitions in South Asian society and politics,’ write Barrow and Haynes, only to ‘suggest a view of the first decades of colonial rule that is profoundly more complicated than any polar position….’47 Here, however, I’m not interested in evaluating the nature of the agency—that is, questions of complicity and coercion do not always provide assistance for rethinking the genre’s instability in relation to other genres. A sizeable class of literati and intellectuals indeed may have been able to carve out domains of influence and played a substantial hand in creating notions of literature and cultural difference,48 but the results may have been unexpected or unintended. Genre, for example, has its own history, often looking backwards and forwards, in order to preserve and innovate its formal definitions in the same impulse. Native agency, in this regard, does not guarantee predictable outcomes. Causes may have unintended or unpredictable effects. Genre operates through its own ‘recombinant’ processes of ‘interaction, selection, and combination’ that are not necessarily beholden to the ‘author-text system’.49 Sometimes, literary works don’t follow in a sequence the same way we think of causality and works may exist and coexist alongside forms and genres that are older or differently produced in a non-linear fashion. There are new forms, true, but this does not imply any kind of ‘progress’ to literary forms. In short, the axial

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relations between history as form and content do not always align— or align in ways that require us to read them interpretively: what of allegory, for example? Often, texts come to us already read, ‘through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions’.50 These statements are all topical for the way the wall posters portray genre. In approaching genre here, I thus follow a version of Bakhtin’s ‘anonymous destinies of artistic discourse’51 that retains more ambiguity with regards to questions of agency that have animated discussions of colonialism. How, then, does one approach genre, performance and literary history? One approach, I believe, is through Alexander Beecroft’s work on literary ecologies. A literary ecology, which he develops on the basis of ecologies from biology, is a metaphor that is more capacious and permitting than economic models. Rather than an economic system in which all items are interchangeable (and thus comparable) on the basis of a monetary or cash value, Beecroft finds ecology a more utile metaphor, especially when there is a desire to preserve the unique, nonmonetary value, of ‘inputs’. When inputs are not equivalent and cannot be made equivalent, the form of exchange isn’t the same as an economic model and a literary ecology is more permissive of that ambiguity. But more than that, ecology is a better metaphor that does not rely on political boundaries of the nation-state and the kinds of recognition in Paris or London that may divorce a work from audiences back at home—and Beecroft specifically critiques Pascale Casanova on these terms.52 For my materials, and many writing about formerly colonised locales, this is all the more relevant given the multilingual, non-national region that was Western India. Beecroft identifies six unique typologies of literary ecologies, two of which I find particularly useful in describing the conditions and transformations that Marathi language and literature underwent during the period canvassed in this book.53 I speak of colonial India as a second vernacularisation or the beginnings of a vernacular literary ecology from a panchoric one, for several reasons, related to both political formations as well as linguistic and literary ones. In the former political case, the 18th century was marked by a long withdrawing Mughal Empire and the emergence of successor states.54 One of the most important successor states was the Marathas, variously dubbed a ‘confederacy’ or an ‘empire’, the interpretive tension a result of its structure as a union of several powerful sardars or generals, who pledged alliance to the brahman Peshwas, chief ministers to the descendants of Chatrapati Shivaji Bhonsale (1627–1680).55 These sardars as well as their descendants patronised a large class of poets—a shared literary culture, panchoric—despite an infirm political alliance. So too did pilgrimage to Pandharpur promote

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a shared literary culture through saint poetry.56 With transitions to colonialism, the environment that sustained the class of travelling poets disappeared whereas the Pandharpur pilgrimage continued.57 But encountering a colonial situation, Marathi came to terms with another cosmopolitan language than Sanskrit: English. Suddenly, a language whose speakers came from halfway across the world, and who transplanted their literature wherever they went, by no means neutrally, judged Marathi according to English standards whereas previously it had been judged, by certain caste groups, against Sanskrit, as I explain in the following chapter. In doing so, English literature, (along with works from European languages that had been translated into English) was posited as a universal and modern ideal to mask the violence of capitalist expansion while Sanskrit’s, universality for the 19th century is evident in the way philology became the preeminent discipline of academia. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that 19th century Marathi witnessed many translations from both languages, a major characteristic of the emergence of a vernacular ecology.58 I have attempted to trace this transformation through generic changes in performance, from travelling poetry to dramatic literature and institutional changes in patronage structures, audiences and performance spaces.

POSTCOLONIAL DEATHS AND WORLDLY FUTURES, PERHAPS Classic work in postcolonial scholarship, such as Gauri Viswanathan’s, has drawn our attention to the way the colonies served as a vital laboratory for definitions and canons of English literature.59 Viswanathan’s work expanded the scope of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) describing not the representation of the other and its relevance for constructions of the self but rather the construction of English studies under explicit colonial dependency. In a way, she described the way the Orient—in this case, India—became a backdrop for the formation of literary Englishness. But if studies of English literature were institutionalised with at least a few colonial motives in mind, what of the literature written during the 19th century, which was, significantly, beyond the scope of Viswanathan’s study? Here, Edward Said’s other classic work, Culture and Imperialism (1992) paved the way for contrapuntal readings of 19th-century-novelistic literature and culture with a fuller consideration of colonial dynamics at the centre of the analysis.60 Nineteenth-century studies thus formed one end of the territory postcolonial theory staked out for itself.

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At the other end, buoyed by Homi Bhabha, postcolonial studies became interested in English-language fiction from postcolonial locales, but mostly in works by emigrès, such as Salman Rushdie. Both Bhabha and Rushdie and their works have become iconic and defining of literary postcoloniality in theory and practice. These two directions enabled the sub-discipline to establish itself easily within English departments in the US or UK, often positioning the ‘postmodern postcolonialist’ in triumphalist ways, while the actual sites of the postcolony remained beyond access, at least for departments of English Literature.61 Owing partially at least to the way postcolonial studies became institutionalised in English departments, the appetite for scholarship on English texts written in formerly colonial locales or by exilic figures remains unsatiated despite assertions of the field’s feeling of exhaustion.62 Or, for that matter, it’s ‘ill-fit’ in postcolonial locales such as South Africa.63 And rather than re-examine this orientation, some recent work has asserted that because Indian writers in English, nowadays, occasionally write for Indian audiences rather than audiences in the US or UK, we may feel less guilty, and even justified, in our focus on English-language texts.64 But it seems as if there is always space to say more about language: perhaps because nobody is ever satisfied despite feelings of exhaustion. A recent volume of Interventions has once again dragged the issue of language out of its shallow wreckage. How are we to position ourselves— we who write about multiple South Asian languages from multiple locations across the globe? In what language do we write and which literatures from which languages do we write about? How are we legible to an academy that is at once global and yet dominated by the Global North? This last point is particularly salient, because, unlike the 1990s, a host of online platforms, publishing outlets and distribution systems (including pirate websites) have ensured that academia has become more global. One consequence is, of course, the redoubled presence of English in professional life, including academia, but the second consequence is that universities in the Global North, who have long had the ability to buy foreign language (literary) texts that few outside of area studies read, now have no excuse not to buy (and read, and consider, and be in conversation with) academic work from the Global South, this text included. Of course, we need to provincialise English as Akshya Saxena mentions following Simon Gikandi. One way to provincialise English is to recognise that there are many Englishes: ‘…Global English is also always local englishes and World Anglophone literature takes shape only in relation to local anglophone literatures.’ It is this recognition, according to her, unique to our particular moment of literary studies, that ‘…is pushing us to examine the limits of our (literary) worlds that we do not share as well as the limits of this English we all seem to share.’65

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If this is the beginnings of a method, then at least three respondents feel much more theory is needed to ensure that ‘world anglophony’ is not simply a broader category of postcolonial studies, but devoid of its politics.66 More interesting to me is what needs to or can happen now that we are in the ‘post-boom’ phase that was propelled by star South Asian novelists—a question raised by Roanne Kantor. If we are to move beyond superstar novelists, then where shall we turn our attention?67 Here, I take up this question by turning to the 19th century: if we are to understand Indian literature beyond superstar novelists, then perhaps we should begin by understanding its history a little better and how it may intersect with categories, theories and frameworks of postcolonial and world literature thinking. We should also want to revisit the literature of colonial India—but differently from Gauri Vishwanathan and Priya Joshi, both of whom focus on English literature and the English novel, respectively, in South Asia. Rather, what happens when we think about how colonialism transformed Marathi literature, and epic literature more broadly, using some of the same pedagogical techniques as English literature. What kinds of Marathi literature did Indians (and the English) consume in the 19th century? Some of the stakes of post-boom scholarship aren’t clear. While there certainly was a resurgence in national thinking, overwhelmingly proving Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) wrong as Bhagat-Kennedy argues,68 what is to be gained by the national frame in a country like India? Or by the casual extension of the political space to South Asia? In postcolonial India, perhaps we ought to remember the many centrifugal disuniting tendencies of region and language, caste and class, and gender, all of which have been mobilised by many parties for governance and other political causes, and sometimes in ways that don’t always align with expected narratives of modernity. Region too, then, is important. Gaurav Desai and Roanne Kantor both speak of the place of Africa in postcolonial studies—the former to say how it doesn’t fit the SouthAsia-dominated models of postcoloniality, and the latter to remark how it has taken a centre stage now that South Asian literatures are ‘postboom’. One of Desai’s key insights is about temporality and differences in history, remarking that African countries were neither under the colonial yoke for as long as South Asian countries nor were they seen to have their own history, complicating models of civilisational progress and clash.69 But if we refuse ‘national’ thinking, it is evident that both points are salient for South Asia as well: colonialism in South Asia was not a monolithic entity, nor was the entire region consolidated under colonial rule at the same time, but was rather a drawn-out process from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. Historians generally view the Battle of Plassey (1757) as a turning point that enabled the East India

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Company to gain access to the Gangetic plain from Bengal, but what about the rest of south Asia? Tipu Sultan’s Mysore wasn’t conquered and colonised until 1799 after the fourth Anglo-Mysore war and large portions of central India and the western Deccan plateau only after the second and third Anglo-Maratha wars of 1803–1805 and 1817–1818 respectively. Portions of Punjab weren’t brought under the East India Company administration until 1849—and let’s not forget the 1857 rebellion after which India came under direct colonial rule. Here, I have tried to be attentive to such problems when we speak about the literary history of colonial India, as well as transformations in literature wrought under the guise of colonialism. Not all regions of what India is today experienced the processes I speak about in the same way partially because they had separate histories against which to understand their colonial condition. But these weren’t limited to colonialism and its immediately preceding century. Recent work, even by popular historians, has acknowledged how the Deccan—the plateau roughly beginning south of the Vindhya mountains was ruled by ‘rebel sultans’ for most of its medieval history. These same rebel sultans were often at odds with developments further north in Delhi. And if the common narrative that India has only been unified as one common political space thrice in its history—by Ashoka (in the 3rd century bce), the Mughals and then the British is to be believed, then the first and second were certainly short lived. With the Mughals, Aurangzeb’s (1658–1707) hard-won Deccan additions to the Mughal Empire collapsed nearly immediately after his death. The point: the national space, whether in India or elsewhere, is hardly homogenous, sometimes registering these heterogeneous fissures along the lines of region, which only loosely map onto language; other times, it reveals fissures along the lines of caste or gender; religious practices too significantly shape differences and divisions that ask us to disaggregate what feels like compulsory national thinking in postcolonial literary studies. Above, I spoke of the ‘narrative of capital’ and the way the provincial thought of Europe became a universal philosophy. One approach to language is to turn the clock backwards and examine the way languages were constituted as affectively resonant through literatures as part of the national project, the way each language became part of that universal philosophy of nationhood. In light of the many essays collected in Interventions 20(3), it is worth mentioning that for the time period of this study, that narrative of capital was by no means a given. Are we to be presentist when approaching the postcolonial world? That is, ought we to understand the present and project backwards? I hope not! Most Indian languages, if we are to follow the work of anthropologists and historians such as Lisa Mitchell and Sumathi Ramaswamy,70 were

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not even established as ‘mother-tongues’—which required Herderian romanticist (and later nationalist) orientation towards language, a topic I take up in the first chapter with relation to Marathi. Marathi similarly was not seen as a language worthwhile of cultivation by the (brahman) intelligentsia before the mid-19th century and the scholar poets I speak about throughout this book were known for Sanskritising Marathi in the 16th–18th centuries, in order to elevate it as a language worthy of literary composition. But maybe one may say something similar about English? Weren’t the intellectuals of the day nose-deep in Latin, Greek (and increasingly, Sanskrit)? In the case of the former two, Milton certainly comes to mind. At the same time, the ‘vernacular’ did constitute a space,71 suggesting that while language didn’t always have the same affective ties associated with formulations of mother tongues in our world, vernacular languages did enable territorial formations, constituted through scriptural and religious practices. For the period covered in this book, roughly 1790–1890, from the final decades of a precolonial world in Maharashtra to the beginnings of the ‘golden era’ of the Marathi Saṅgīt Nāṭak (music drama), some revelatory statistics are in order: in 1911, literacy in English was only 1 per cent, and in Indian languages, barely more at 6 per cent according to the colonial census.72 These striking numbers ask us to rethink the overwhelming English monolingualism of postcolonial approaches to literary studies and also to the genre: in what literary genres could a literary ecology become visible if literacy is not a precondition, let alone English? What literary genres are the vehicles of that ecology? Isn’t the focus on language, literacy and purportedly secular reading itself a colonial construct as Viswanathan and others (see below) have suggested? This book addresses not only literary studies in South Asia beyond the traditional field of postcolonial literary inquiry— majoritarian languages such as English and French in former colonial and global literary centres—but also owing to concerns of literacy, beyond the genre that dominates most scholarship on world literature, that is, beyond the novel.73 In postcolonial regions such as South Asia, a focus on the English language is limited, at best, given that people engage their public and private lives through multiple registers of multiple languages. If anecdotal evidence serves—it is rare for me to pass a day, living in the highly urban centre of Pune, where I don’t use at least three languages (Marathi, English and my unpractised Hindi) in their contexts, rarely speaking hybridised English as though to welcome an interstitial future, but rather in the manner of code-switching: either one or the other or another, often translating from one to the others.74 Often, I have to translate between various registers and dialects of the same language.

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Even in Pune, long regarded as the Marathi-language cultural capital, multilingual contexts are the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps, my most amusing experience in this regard occurred with the German language. Pune—as it will become evident in later chapters—has had a long connection with the German language, corroborating a long legacy of comparative philology from the 19th century. Some joke that soon Pune will have more German speakers than Germany! Marathi speakers often learn German because it is easier to pronounce than French and because it is relatively simpler grammatically than is Marathi: German only has four declensions, and its verbs are not conjugated by gender. On a visit to one of the many wonderful manuscript libraries around Pune, where I gathered some of the materials for the second chapter, a young Maharashtrian student from Sangli looked at both my wife and me, and asked pointedly, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ ‘Ja, aber warum fragen Sie?’ we curiously responded! A few hours away in Mumbai (Bombay), one may see theatre in four languages every day—Marathi, Hindi-Urdu, Gujarati and English—a condition that produces and reflects many dynamics of language and the circulation of performance and text.75 Whether in professional contexts, social contexts or quotidian activities—shopping, asking for and giving directions, casual conversations with strangers, etc.—language often changes to adapt to both (or the many) parties present in the situation. So, in addition to code-switching, translation is an everyday occurrence. It won’t come as a surprise, therefore, that studies foregrounding English-language texts and the experience and world represented through them are, at most, a fragment of a rich and important, varied, social and literary field. At worst, studies of Indian English literature (still) constitute a kind of conceited approach summarised in Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West’s statement from the anthology Mirrorwork (1997) that the best postcolonial Indian fiction is written in Indian English and not in other Indian languages.76 Rushdie’s statement and similar sentiments are postcolonial mirrors of colonial pasts, and repeat and reflect the over-quoted sentiments of long-dead colonial officials.77 And scholarship that has and continues to focus on English language texts…. Some recent work points the way forward. Michael Allan’s work on Arabic and the concept of adab in colonial Egypt is an intervention that broadens Viswanathan’s work on English in India.78 He isolates the concept of ‘world literature’ and defines it as an institutional, pedagogical construct that inculcates literary reading practices in students. He theorises the exclusionary nature of those practices instilled through institutions of world literature: about maintaining interpretive distance from the materials, about creating a practice less emotionally involved than the kinds of sentiments that would pertain to religious practices of

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reading. How we read is at least as important as what we read, if not more so. These observations are reminiscent of the kinds of critique against which Indian language literatures were evaluated against English and the place of ‘secularism’ for such distinctions. But as the word ‘world’ in Allan’s title implies, all practices participate in a process of worldmaking, of observing, moving through and being in the world. Aamir Mufti’s recent Forget English! not only for its clear, unambiguous focus on language but also Mufti’s exposition of the world literature possible if one sets aside the novel for a focus on poetry, a concern shared by Anjali Nerlekar.79 If the narrative of the novel charts the journey of modernity and modernism from a few European literary traditions outwards, is the journey the same for other genres? For Mufti, the answer is clear. Do they also (purportedly) journey unidirectionally? How do they fare, dialogically?80 For me, here: what about performance and theatre? In what ways does this accessible medium bear the traces of, or become an exciting case study for revisiting the ‘colonial’ part of the postcolonial literary studies? Theatre studies, in this respect, has completed some of the hard work of centring modernity in India around the theatre. It sounds solipsistic to say so: theatre has centred theatre, but can we not say the same of literary studies dominated by the novel, viewing the novel as central to modernity? This is precisely the critique A. Dharwadker makes in her book (2005), arguing that despite the ‘unprecedented’ emergence formation of experimental and literary drama in more than a dozen Indian languages, drama and theatre continue to be on the margins of postcolonial theory. One of the main reasons for this ‘obscurity lie[s] in the linguistic plurality of Indian theatre practice’.81 The language of the academy is English, but not of theatre, which needs to be accessible if it seeks an audience. A. Dharwadker’s focus is decidedly postcolonial India and her book’s reflections on the origins are contained in a few pages in her introduction. But also—her focus is on the creation of a pan-Indian theatre, in ways that are not limited by language, in order to demonstrate the overlaps and exchanges across India. This too is the focus of her edited anthology The Poetics of Modernity (2019), which contains an array of primary documents—essays, statements, manifestos—about theatre from 1850 onwards.82 These documents highlight the plurality of modern Indian theatre practice—one that functions by translation, borrowing and adaptation, often without going through English as a medium. I take up some of A. Dharwadker’s cues in Chapter 2, especially with regards to authorship and 19th-century drama. In this book, however, I don’t write about Indian theatre broadly; rather, I focus on Marathi theatre and performance to demonstrate

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its ‘worldliness and make it legible within discourses of world literature studies. I do so through a consideration of genre and the way technologies of theatre-making transformed genre in theatre and performance practice as I demonstrated with the wall posters before. But my approach also diverges from scholars based in India such as Shanta Gokhale and Makarand Sathe. Both work from a clear moment of origins, either in Vishnudas Bhave’s productions (see Chapter 2) or those of multiple others in colonial India, such as Jotirao Phule.83 My approach differs in two significant ways: Unlike Gokhale, who foregrounds the playwright-author, I am interested in placing authors back into their dialogic contexts: even the most authorial of theatre personalities worked with actors who had some control over their characters. And secondly, unlike Sathe and Gokhale, I use performance as my category of analysis, which enables us to see more clearly the intergeneric pasts as they are incorporated into modern Marathi drama. In taking this approach, I do not wish to make claims about continuity from precolonial traditions nor to reject ‘Western’ influence. In writing about how Marathi drama was new in the 19th century, I believe, one needs to address transformations in the genre—and these owe to ‘Western’ influence as much as they do to more indigenous performance traditions.84

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SAME COIN One of the most important questions to ask is how the study of English transformed Indian literatures. One answer follows the Saidian logic of Orientalism, in which the educational apparatus of colonialism ensured that Indians were ‘Crushed by English Poetry’.85 Colonialism’s rupture, according to Chandra, resulted in the ‘triumph of an imperialist Western discourse’, which ‘remains the more-or-less unarticulated base of our own consciousness’.86 Before outlining the chapters of this book, I want to address the same issue of literary influence through no less a figure than one of the most celebrated postcolonial Marathi novelists Bhalchandra Nemade (1938–). Over the years, his testy exchanges with Salman Rushdie have generated a fair amount of press. In both cases, contexts are important—biographical ones, historical ones, literary ones. They are ultimately wines of the same vintage that have aged through the frictions between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages—in competition with each other for their legitimacy, as Beecroft suggests of such ecologies. In an interview, Nemade speaks of his childhood and upbringing in Sangavi, a small town in a northern district of Maharashtra bordering Madhya Pradesh (before there was such a thing and Maharashtra or

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Madhya Pradesh). Part of his upbringing, in this regard, could hardly be more unlike Rushdie’s, dramatised in Rushdie’s first major novel Midnight’s Children (1981). Nemade was not born in what was then the wealthiest district of Bombay and did not go on to study at the Rugby School in England, following a pre-determined path to Cambridge— presumably, Rushdie had agency but history shows otherwise for pupils of the Rugby School. Nemade travelled the Poona circuit of the 1950s–1960s, which he dramatised in his novel Kosalā (1963). But following that, Nemade travelled to London, where he taught for a while at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He reflects upon his upbringing: mâṭrikaparyanta māzhī sarjanaśīlatecī jāṇīv khāndeśācyā ḍongarānmadhalyā prācīn kāḷāpāśūn cālat ālelyā samṛddha lokvidyā—viśeṣataḥ tyā kāḷāt khāndeśāt phulūn ālele tamāśāce anek pāraṃpārik prakār, bārā balutedārāncyā ādima lokakalā, vārkarī āṇi mahānubhav sāhitya, hyā samṛddha paraṃparānvar posalī gelī. Hyā ulaṭ ādhunik marāṭhī āṇi bhāratīya sāhitya ingrajīsārakhyā saṅkucit sāhitya-saṅkalpanānvarac nako titakā visaṃbūn rāhat āhe, hī tocaṇī eka prādhyāpak-samikśak-saṃśodhak mhaṇūn malā sārkhī asvastha karat hotī.87 Until twelfth [grade], my creative understanding [emerged] from the abundant folk knowledge that had been passed down from the earliest times among the hills of khandesh—particularly, in the many traditional flowering forms of Khandesh’s tamasha, the popular arts of the twelve kinds of balutedars, the literature of the vārkarī-s and mahānubhav-s, [my creative understanding had] thrived on such traditional abundance. Instead of this, modern Marathi and Indian literature was overly complicit with the ends of English and other similar literatures, this prick, because [I am] a professor, researcher, always made me uncomfortable.

We cannot but pause to notice the romantic tropes so immanent in this outpouring about hills, tradition and rootedness: Nemade championed ‘nativism’ in Marathi, an approach to literature and culture that privileges and attempts to revive as well as utilise more home-grown genres, forms, theories and practices of literature, one that departs from narrow, jingoistic nationalism. At the same time, he purportedly rejects foreign influences, especially in English.88 Lost in the English translation is yet another element that needs to be emphasised: the word lok used in compound with vidyā (knowledge) and then with kalā (art). It is the same word used in conjunction with popular poets—

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lok kavi or lok śāhīr—and here Nemade reaches back to a panchoric ecology, lionising folk knowledge and folk art. And the dimensions of the word lok, variously referring to the people or folk are significant for how intellectuals adopted romantic discourses from the 19th century onwards. But even more significantly, a related and derivative word, laukik, formed through vowel gradation denotes not just ‘popular’ but also ‘worldly’ when contrasted with a-laukik or ‘other-worldly’. Far from a pedantic exercise, Nemade’s nativism draws upon a romantic discourse that stretches back to my historical actors writing in the 1860s, who adapted Herder and Kant for their purposes, as I discuss in the following chapter. But the questions Nemade asks a little later are significant for us, as comparativists too, living in a world where linguicide is ever present.89 Nemade asks: marāṭhīsārakhī bhāṣā parkīya prabhāv kaśī pacavate? hyā ulaṭ jagātlyā moṭhmoṭhyā bhāṣā aśāc prabhāvānkhālī kā martāt? āplyā saṅgīt-nṛtyādī kalāc kā pahilyā darjyācyā rāhilyā?90 How does a language like Marathi digest foreign influence? Unlike this, why do many large languages of the world die under such influence? Why have our music and dance, etc. arts remained of the first rate?

The consistent romanticisation of the Marathi language aside—as well as the value judgements that disparage foreign influence—Nemade asks questions that are at the heart of comparative literature and specifically a comparative literature that is alive to the trappings of a colonial and precolonial past, and presumably one that feels the need to compare non-circulating materials with those that circulate. While many have disagreed with Nemade—to say that that Marathi literature has not suffered from contact, and also contains significant relationships to its precolonial past—Nemade’s statements are one side of a coin whose other side shows Rushdie’s: both are equally elite discourses, the cosmopolitan and the (well-connected) nativist. The one derides Indian literatures not produced in English whereas the other (problematically) fetishises them. Marathi scholarship offers a view of these materials that interpolates postcolonial scholarship but is more aware of relations between the colonial text and the nativist significations of Nemade. A critic like Anand Patil responds to Nemade forcefully.91 Patil asks us to consider whether we are postcolonial and nativist (deśivādī) as defined by Nemade or are we simply post-Independence? And, in addition, whose postcolonial?

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Whose nativism? And even beyond the boundaries of the Marathi language, nativism was and has become part of the critical vocabulary for literary studies in India.92 Echoing Spivak’s critique, Patil locates the continuing erasure of the sites and literatures of the postcolony in the geopolitical moment of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s inaugural Non-Resident Indian Day (9 January 2000)—to mention that once again, given the way capital flows operate, certain brands of nativist discourse are quite elite in their orientation.93 Dalit writers, mentions Patil, have long been sceptical of Nemade, whose work’s experimental and aestheticism is often at odds with politics. Sometimes (not in Nemade’s case), the overlap between fundamentalist, upper-caste (Hindutva) politics and nativism is too evident and leaves little room for more marginal literatures.94

THE SHAPE OF THIS BOOK This book articulates an epochal transition in literary culture, from the late premodern into a colonial society, roughly 1790–1890, that remains alert to the trappings and stratifications of caste, especially, in addition to other forms of privilege that enable my many historical actors to be visible agents within the colonial archive as well as Marathi scholarship. It is a privilege that marks them as the quintessential non-subaltern native agents, and therefore less mediated in the discourses of colonialism. I attempt to navigate a course that steers through contemporary, classic and Marathi scholarship on colonial and postcolonial studies, especially in relation to performance genres and performance histories. How did a political transfer from the late premodern to the 19th century alter the literary ecology of Marathi—and for whom? How did a relatively distinct, panchoric ecology, experience a second vernacularisation via the colonial encounter? Answering these questions enables us to understand the problems with eurochronology: hasn’t economic history shown us that otherwise?95 But it also engages definitions of literature: why are we to assume only majoritarian languages, the novel and ‘literature’, conceptually, are defining nodes of literary studies? In answering these questions, this book proceeds in two halves, the first describing convergences with global paradigms, while the second half describes the uniqueness of the Marathi situation and a divergence. Perhaps the single-most-important transformation in Marathi vernacular culture came with a conceptual redefinition of literature along with global romantic 19th-century paradigms, which is the topic of my next, first chapter, ‘Romanticism in India and Gifts for the Coloniser’. Persons such as V.S. Chiplunkar (1850–1882) drew upon

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Johann Herder’s (1744–1803) romantic ideas of the autochthony of language and literature to formulate a new conception of what may be thought of as literature. This newer conception identified worldly (laukik) themes as the basis for Marathi literature, and also a tradition of popular, bardic poets known in Marathi as śāhīrs. Chiplunkar, drawing upon Herder, emphasised a deep, worldly connection to the soil and its relation to the poetic experience, and he inverted the hierarchies between Sanskrit and Marathi, in order to place greater emphasis on the ‘natural’ (prakṛt) Marathi rather than the ‘perfected’ Sanskrit. Poetry, especially popular bardic poetry, thus became the basis of what constituted ‘literature’, which Chiplunkar later refined through Sanskrit poetic theory. My first chapter thus traces a global theoretical conversation from the early 19th century to the early 20th, about what literature is, its interpolation of Marathi literature and how the colonies intervened (via Sanskrit) in European discourses on literature and language: what Padma Rangarajan has called a regift from the colonised to the coloniser.96 The second chapter ‘From Literary Commons to Literary Canons’ grapples with another significant alteration in notions of literature: canonicity and the transfer of authority from the poet-performer to the author or editor and the subsequent creation of a reader. Marathi epic poetry—the ākhyāns mentioned on the playbills above—were committed to print in the anthology Selections from the Marathi Poets (1854), arguably the most reprinted book in the Marathi language. Committing epic poetry to print from its manuscript form was fundamentally transformative of the performer–audience relationship, which could not mutate into an author–reader one even though Selections initiated a readerly practice. Furthermore, the anthology as a dehistoricising field decontextualised the poetry onto the printed page and created the Marathi literary canon. To describe the process of canonisation, I borrow from Marx’s understanding of the enclosure of the common lands in England. Through individual acts of violence first, and then later parliamentary intervention, enclosing the commons dispossessed people and transformed them into landless labourers, forcing them into a cash economy. Using Marx’s model loosely, I suggest an analogue to this situation in the literary–cultural world, especially with regards to the pervasive epic traditions in South Asia. Can we frame editing and authorship—also deeply entwined with the histories of capitalism and print culture—as transformative practices that similarly appropriated the broad literary–cultural ‘commons’ such as the epic traditions and indigenous knowledges? To elaborate this point further, I closely examine texts and performances of Vishnu Amrut Bhave (1821?–1901) widely acknowledged as one of the first Marathi playwrights but whose practice

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evinces more of a kinship with scholar-poets and their epic poetry. Just as the previous chapter spoke to the way definitions of the literary were contingent on a colonial milieu, here I explicate editorial practices and their impact on spectatorship and readership. Collectively, these practices locate the colony at the centre of a global literary enterprise, rather than a forgotten margin. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 depart from literary transitions to colonial society and are instead firmly rooted in a global colonial episteme with frequent references to residual tendencies from a precolonial tradition and their transformation in a colonial world. If the first two chapters described the simultaneous, syncopated and convergent relationship of the Bombay– Poona literary nexus to the global literary circuit; this second half describes divergences that give rise to a vernacular ecology. Chapter 3 ‘The Foundational Indian Melodrama’ investigates a play that has largerthan-life ideological underpinnings in colonial and postcolonial India: Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā. Despite its iconic status, for Indians today as well as global romantic movements in the 19th century, the play has only ever been popular once in its modern history: when it was staged as a music-drama in the 1880s, translated by another figure also hailed as the ‘first’ Marathi dramatist, Balvant Pandurang Kirloskar (1843–1885). All other productions have been revivals for (mostly) academic purposes. I historicise the play for 19th-century audiences, arguing that the play functions as a melodramatic surrogate for decaying social relationships, building on scholarship by Peter Brook and Joseph Roach. By viewing Śakuntalā through the prisms of melodrama and surrogation, I am able to examine processes of aristocratic retrenchment in the 19th century as an emerging, predominantly brahman, middle-class sought patronage both from colonial and aristocratic personages. Thus, the play and similar productions became vehicles for triangulating a sort of unstable cohesion between three social groups, just as the performances I spoke about in the first chapter were also socially cohesive and about the world. In Chapter 4 ‘Incorporating “Love”: From Sanskrit Kavya to Marathi Drama’ I write about the aforementioned Kirloskar’s imaginative method and creation of an authorial discourse in his dramatic script and an authoritative performance on stage. We see this in the productions and text of his play A Musical about Subhadra (1882), a play whose popularity has remained undiminished for the past 140 years. This chapter binds all others together at a theoretical, intertextual, generic and thematic level. So, I speak about the incorporation of ‘low’ and ‘high’ poetic elements—the popular poetry of śāhīrs and epic poetry from Chapter 2—into the text of Subhadra, as well as the way the play exceeds its performance space not just as a popular production but as one that

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sought and incorporated advice from many eminent personalities of the day. It was a kind of poetic ‘excess’ that reminds one of the way Chiplunkar spoke about the poetic excess of śāhīrs in Chapter 1 that I return to here. My larger purpose is to describe and understand how the late premodern materials I theorised in the first two chapters, as well as the more Sanskritic elements of Chapter 3, are ‘incorporated’ in a process that is neither indicative of colonialism’s rupture nor an easy continuity from precolonial India. Rather, it speaks to an enlarged literary ecology in which earlier genres and formalisms become part of a new kind of dramatic literature. Ultimately, Kirloskar’s and similar productions attempted to create a totalising social world by incorporating various poetic registers. Bakhtin’s theories enable me to describe the success of Kirloskar’s method here and contrast them with those from Chapter 2. But just as Kirloskar’s drama exceeded its theatrical spaces and permeated the social world of the 1880s, the world too, exceeded Kirloskar’s representational space, and my final chapter ‘Heterogeneous Worlds: The Farce against Drama’ examines the pervasive, counterhegemonic genre of the farce. Farces often lacked an author and trafficked in a kind of realism that is absent from most Kirloskarinspired music drama, which focused on mythical and lionised historical personages. I see the farce’s generic emergence in tandem with the transformations in the literary ecology: an urban genre that needed to be outside the formalist, incorporative and hegemonic grasp of the brahman intelligentsia that frequented, lauded and popularised Kirloskarite music-drama. In this respect, the farce is a remarkable specimen of the late 19th century, containing an array of episodes and social encounters found almost nowhere else in the Marathi literary– historical record. I approach these materials through theories of contact zones (Mary Louise Pratt), affect (especially Lauren Berlant), and parody (Linda Hutcheon), as appropriate to each farce; my theoretical precepts are as diverse as the materials themselves. If Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate upper-caste attempts at consolidation, then Chapter 5 is designed to show fragmentation of literary (and social worlds) and a literary culture that is larger and broader than can be seen through the productions of any one social class/caste. World Literature and the Question of Genre thus describes generic transitions from the late premodern into the colonial era. In tow, I demonstrate how evolving technologies of literature and performance in tandem with new romantic ideas of literature transform literature itself into one that is still only partially legible as literature in our scholarly study today. These transitions are visible only if we refocus our attention away from majoritarian languages and genres. And of greater consequence, focusing on purportedly minor languages enables us to

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rethink problems of eurochronology in literary studies. But to do so, we must first shed ‘literature’ of its associations with literacy and also move beyond the genre of the novel. My broader argument for the book, therefore, is that (Marathi) literature in colonial India adopted an ‘incorporative’ attitude to its precolonial past and a relationship of syncopation, simultaneity and reciprocity with its colonial and global moment. These processes enabled Marathi literature, categorically, to be remade and enlarged over the course of the 19th century, from a panchoric into vernacular literature, from largely oral vāṅmay to printed sāhitya. These incorporative and syncopated-reciprocal gestures were, of course, part of a social dynamic of caste, class and power but cannot fully be encompassed within the intersectional social grid. Literary culture, I strongly believe (along with many of my historical actors), is a form of excess that cannot be reduced to any of its parts and functions.

NOTES   1 In Marathi, these terms are lok-śāhīr or lok-kavi for the people’s/popular poet, pandit-kavi for the scholar-poet and santa-kavi or saint-poet.  2 Marāṭhī bakhars or prose chronicles written at courts, could be, arguably, considered literature too, but they weren’t designed to circulate to the public beyond courtly confines.  3 https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size. Arguably, English is also an Indian language, having been spoken in South Asia at least as long as it has in many places—the United States, Australia, New Zealand, etc.—though the number of native speakers of English in South Asia is quite marginal.   4 Who speaks the ‘Hindi’ described on Ethnolog’s webpage? Or is that Hindi is simply an umbrella term for a host of Indian languages that are not always intelligible to each other: Awadhi, Maithili, Chhattisgarhi, among others, much as many Marathi dialects are notoriously different from ‘standard’ Marathi. I would be surprised if this were not the case for many languages on Ethnolog’s list, Arabic, for example, or Chinese.  5 I use the term ‘late premodernity’ here, following Alexander Beecroft, who follows Allison Busch. See Allison Busch, ‘Literary Responses to the Mughal Imperium: The Historical Poems of Keśavdās’. South Asia Research 25, no. 1 (1 May 2005): 31–54, https://doi.org/10.1177/0262728005051606, accessed 10 May 2019; Alexander Beecroft, ‘Eurafrasiachronologies: Between the Eurocentric and the Planetary’. Journal of World Literature 1, no. 1 (1 January 2016): 17–28, https://doi.org/10.1163/2405648000101003, accessed 23 April 2019.  6 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016).

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  7 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 235.  8 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). See also Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).   9 One notable exception is Susie Tharu, ‘The Arrangement of an Alliance: English and the Making of Indian Literatures’, in Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Svati Joshi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 160–180. Tharu explicitly writes about how various Indian literatures are not only complicit in masking liberal ideologies of empire but also makes them vehicles for nationalist agendas. In general, while I agree with her approach, it tackles literature’s politics at the expense of its other dimensions. 10 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, translated by M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 11 On global theatre circuits in the long 19th century, see Kedar A. Kulkarni and Tobias Becker, ‘Editorial: Beyond the Playhouse: Travelling Theatre in the Long Nineteenth Century’. Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44, no. 1 (10 December 2017): 3–7. 12 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012), 1–28, http://site.ebrary.com/id/10715024, accessed 4 September 2019. 13 David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature—David Damrosch (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 6–23. 14 And, perhaps we shouldn’t be teaching Shakespeare at all … in English departments. He is certainly better off in Theatre departments. 15 See especially Spivak’s comments in David Damrosch and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch’. Comparative Literature Studies 48, no. 4 (2011): 455–485, https://doi. org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0455, accessed 2 August 2019. 16 Abiola Irele, ‘Introduction: Perspectives on the African Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, ed. Abiola Irele (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–2. Eileen Julian writes, ‘oral traditions and indigenous languages exist as a reservoir of resources to be exploited by the modern writer . . . [but] have no modern future of their own’ as cited in Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature, 26 (CUP, 2017). 17 While much of this understanding overlaps with Pollock’s definitions of Sanskrit kāvya (a kind of imaginative literature that posits orality but is, in fact, highly textual, characterised by constant reflections upon language itself), the late premodern literary culture of western India was slightly different, depending upon which genres one considered. I examine these details in Chapters 2 and 3. See Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods

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in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2–5. 18 Damrosch and Spivak, ‘Comparative Literature/World Literature’, 474. 19 Christopher Balme, ‘Playbills and the Theatrical Public Sphere’. In Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Charlotte Canning (Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010), 39. 20 Balme, ‘Playbills and the Theatrical Public Sphere.’ 21 For comparisons, especially see those provided in Balme, 54, 56. 22 Ashok Ranade, Stage Music of Maharashtra, 1st ed. (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1986); Sudhanva Deshpande, ‘Excluding the Petty and the Grotesque: Depicting Women in the Early Twentieth Century Marathi Theatre’, in Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power, ed. Lata Singh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 173–193. 23 Francesca Orsini, ‘The Multilingual Local in World Literature’. Comparative Literature 67, no. 4 (2015): 345–374. 24 Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 95. 25 Green, 117. 26 I have written about the issue of prostitutes elsewhere, see Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘The Popular Itinerant Theatre of Maharashtra, 1843–1880’, Asian Theatre Journal 32, no. 1 (June 2015): 218–220. The article also discusses both and other wall posters in greater depth. Also, see Chapter 3. 27 Anna C. Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 215. 28 Ibid., 28. 29 Mark Vareschi and Mattie Burkert, ‘Archives, Numbers, Meaning: The Eighteenth-Century Playbill at Scale’. Theatre Journal 68, no. 6 (2016): 600, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2016.0108, accessed 5 April 2019. 30 Pollock, The Language of the Gods, 3–5. 31 Sushil Kumar De, ‘The Akhyayika and the Katha in Classical Sanskrit’. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 3, no. 3 (1924): 517. 32 Bhimrav Balavant Kulkarni, ed. Marāṭhī phārsa: ekoṇisāvyā śatakātīla prātinidhika nivaḍaka phārsāñcā saṅgraha (Puṇe: Mahārāshṭra Sāhitya Parishada, 1987). 33 If one goes by classical dramatic theory of the Nāṭyaśāstra, then there is no śokarasa, but instead a karūṇa rasa. Some people have mentioned that kāruṇya, the quality of the karūṇa rasa, is not in fact about compassion, as it is often mentioned, but that interpreting it as ‘compassion’ is a Buddhist inflection. Rather, there is a connection between tragic and śoka that cannot be ignored in epic poetry. Sheldon Pollock, Reader on Rasa: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2016), 27. 34 I borrow the phrase from Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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35 Joshi, In Another Country, xviii, 8. 36 Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day, 2015. 37 Ibid., 33–35. Arguably, a third vernacularisation considers the impact of Persian on Marathi between the 14th and 18th centuries. 38 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Mani’s work is a comprehensive account and attempt to locate the woman’s voice within s discourse dominated by upper-caste men, colonial officials and missionaries. 39 For caste, specifically, Nicholas Dirks has propagated ideas about the colonial construction of caste (2001) while Sumit Guha’s recent work Beyond Caste (2015), has shown that caste was always a locally determined phenomenon contingent on group dynamics and political power. 40 Michael S. Dodson, for example, notes the influence of Sanskrit pandits with regards to colonial socio-cultural policies. See Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770–1880 (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 148–155. 41 Thomas R. Trautmann, ‘The Past in the Present,’ Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts 1 (2011), http://hdl. handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0001.002; William H. Baxter, ‘Response to Trautmann,’ Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts 1 (2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0001.003; Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 164. 42 Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘Emotion and Rasa in Premodern and Classical India,’ Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 19 (13 May 2017): 30–32; Thomas O. Beebee, ‘What the World Thinks about Literature: Beyond Euro-American Theory and Criticism,’ ed. Sheldon Pollock, Comparative Literature Studies 53, no. 4 (2016): 786–793, https://doi.org/10.5325/ complitstudies.53.4.0786. Naturally, there are glowing reviews from South Asianists and Sanskritists, but Beebee’s is a missed opportunity from someone in comparative literature. 43 C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 44 I refer, primarily, to Partha Chatterjee’s distinction between the material and spiritual worlds, germane to nationalist thought, in which the spiritual domain became a sacrosanct field for Indians to define themselves in a variety of ways. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6; Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India’, in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers (London: Routledge, 1997), 122. 45 Bhavani Raman, Document Raj Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 7–8. 46 Dharwadker, ‘Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India’, 120–121. Priya Joshi also echoes this critique in her own work, see Joshi, In Another Country, 6–7.

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47 Ian J. Barrow and Douglas E. Haynes, ‘The Colonial Transition: South Asia, 1780–1840’, Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 3 (July 2004): 471–472; 475, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X03001203. 48 On cultural difference and its theorisation, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Origins of Indirect Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 49 For work specifically related to literary activity, see Vilashini Cooppan, ‘World Literature between History and Theory’, in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. Theo d’Haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (2014), 196. 50 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 2002), x. 51 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 259. 52 Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature, 18–20. 53 For a general overview of his typologies, see Beecroft, 33–36. 54 P.J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution?, Themes in Indian History. Oxford in India Readings (New Delhi; Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 55 Stewart Gordon, The Marathas: 1600–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 56 Digambar Balkrishna Mokashi and Philip C. Engblom, Palkhi, a Pilgrimage to Pandharpur (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1990). 57 Prabhā Gaṇorakara, Marāṭhītīla Striyāñcī Kavitā, Pahilī āvr̥ttī (Mumbaī: Lokavāṅmaya Gr̥ha, 2015), 89. 58 Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature, 34–35. 59 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest. Terry Eagleton sees it slightly differently, as part of the upper class’s civilising mission of the lower classes in England. See Chapter 1 in Terry Eagleton. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. For him too, literature is a discourse of power, but one that operates through class and religion rather than race and colonialism. I’m not sure I understand how the four aren’t related, in his mind. 60 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993). 61 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 361. See also how writing in various languages is uncongenial for the literary markets of the first world: Benita Parry, ‘The Institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies’ in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 73. 62 See, for example, Ankhi Mukherjee, What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015); Ulka Anjaria, A History of the Indian Novel in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On ‘exhaustion’, see Jennifer Wenzel in Sunil Agnani et al. 2007. ‘Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav

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Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel’. PMLA 122, no. 3 (2007): 634. 63 Katherine Bergren, The Global Wordsworth: Romanticism out of Place (UBC Press, 2019), 53–54. 64 Ulka Anjaria, ‘Indian Fiction: Why the English vs Bhasha Debate No Longer Makes Sense’, 2019, Text, Scroll.in, https://scroll.in/article/748627/ indian-fiction-why-the-english-vs-bhasha-debate-no-longer-makessense, accessed 20 May 2019. 65 Akshya Saxena. 2018. ‘A Worldly Anglophony: Empire and Englishes’. Interventions 20, no. 3 (3 April 2018): 6–7, https://doi.org/10.1080/136980 1X.2018.1443830, accessed 15 February 2021. 66 In the same issue, see references to Saxena in Roanne L. Kantor, ‘Futures Past: South Asian Literature “Post-Boom’” Interventions 20, no. 3 (3 April 2018): 345–353, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1452626; Monika Bhagat-Kennedy, ‘Nation After World: Rethinking “The End of Postcolonial Theory’” Interventions 20, no. 3 (3 April 2018): 335–344, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1452625; Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘Response’ Interventions 20, no. 3 (3 April 2018): 361–365, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/1369801X.2018.1446842. 67 Kantor, ‘Futures Past.’ 68 Bhagat-Kennedy, ‘Nation After World,’ 336. 69 Gaurav Desai, ‘Response’. Interventions 20, no. 3 (3 April 2018): 5, https:// doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1446841, accessed 15 February 2021. 70 Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (University of California Press, 1997); Lisa Mitchell. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 71 Pushkar Sohoni, ‘Vernacular as a Space: Writing in the Deccan’, South Asian History & Culture 7, no. 3 (July 2016): 258–270. See also the Introduction in Tukārāma and Dilip Chitre, Says Tuka: Selected Poetry (New Delhi; London; New York: Penguin Books India; Penguin Books, 1991). 72 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Commonwealth Series. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 66. 73 In the words of one critic, ‘Areas that postcolonial theory needs to address more clearly, therefore, have to do with non-Anglophone anomalous works that inherently challenge the postcolonial paradigm; with the place of real ism, postmodernism, and generic definitions in that paradigm; with the contending claims of aesthetic pleasure and social transformation endemic in discussions of literature and art; and with challenges from gender studies beyond traditional western feminism.’ See John C. Hawley. 2010. ‘The Colonizing Impulse of Postcolonial Theory’. Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 4 (2010): 784. 74 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London; New York: Routledge Classics, 1994), 219. 75 Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, ‘Theatres of Independence: Drama, Theory, and Urban Performance in India since 1947’, in Studies in Theatre History and Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 72–84.

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76 Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, eds. Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, 1st ed. (New York: H. Holt & Co. 1997). See also a review by Sunil Khilnani, ‘MIRRORWORK: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947–1997 Edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West. Henry Holt: 554 Pp., $15 Paper : INDIA: From Midnight to the Millennium. By Shashi Tharoor. Arcade: 392 Pp., $27.95’, Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1997, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-sep-14-bk-31978-story. html, accessed 6 August 2019. 77 Naturally, I refer to Thomas Macaulay here—but don’t feel the need to quote his remarks on Indian literatures. 78 Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 79 Mufti, Forget English!; Anjali Nerlekar, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2016). 80 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (The University of Chicago Press, 2014). 81 Dharwadker, Theatres of Independence, 2. 82 Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, A Poetics of Modernity: Indian Theatre Theory, 1850 to the present (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019). 83 Shanta Gokhale, Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000); Makarand Sathe, A Socio-Political History of Marathi Theatre: Thirty Nights, trans. Irawati Karnik and Shanta Gokhale (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015). 84 Anand Patil, Western Influence on Marathi Drama: A Case Study (Panaji, Goa: Rajhauns Vitaran, 1994). 85 Sudhir Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (India: Routledge, 2018), 18–78. 86 Ibid., 173. 87 Bhālacandra Nemāḍe, Nivaḍaka mulākhatī (Mumbaī: Lokavāṅmaya Gr̥ha 2010), 208. For the original statement and its translation, see Bhalchandra Vaman Nemade, Ṭīkāsvayaṃvara (Auraṅgābāda: Sāketa Prakāśana, 1990), 102–122; Makarand R. Paranjape, ed. 1997. Nativism: Essays in Criticism (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi), 233–254. 88 For more about nativism, see Paranjape, Nativism. For a critique of Nemade’s version of nativism, see Ānanda Pāṭīla, Ṭīkāvastraharaṇa: [āntaravidyāśāstrīya taulanika sāhitya-sãskr̥ tī mīmā̃ sā (Nāgapūra: Ākā̃ kshā Prakāśana, 2008), 59–60. 89 As an example, I give the recent museum fire in Brazil, whose blaze destroyed the only remnant recordings of lost languages. See Ed Yong, ‘What Was Lost in Brazil’s Devastating Museum Fire’. The Atlantic, 4 September 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/ brazil-rio-de-janeiro-museum-fire/569299/, accessed 17 May 2019. 90 Nemāḍe, Nivaḍaka mulākhatī, 209. 91 Pāṭīla, Ṭīkāvastraharaṇa. 92 Paranjape, Nativism. 93 Patil specifically singles out the contradictions in Nemade’s thought and its derivations, in addition to the ways in which various Indian-language

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organisations overseas are willing participants in the construction of one kind of elite connected nativism: Pāṭīla, Ṭīkāvastraharaṇa, 65, 82–83. 94 Pāṭīla, 71, 73–74, 79. 95 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Kaveh Yazdani, India, Modernity and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.) (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 96 Padma Rangarajan, Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (Fordham University Press, 2014), 129.

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1 ROMANTICISM IN INDIA AND GIFTS FOR THE COLONISER In a widely known, though likely apocryphal story, a brahman pandit traveled all the way to Oxford to meet Max Müller, the famed nineteenth century Sanskritist and philologist, inspired by the latter’s Indological research. Showing up on his doorstep, the pandit enthusiastically rang the bell and awaited an answer. For some reason, Müller himself answered the door, (rather than his butler). The pandit immediately recognized him and began an energetic, laudatory outpouring commending Müller’s work…. Müller looked at him quizzically. In his perfectly accented English he asked, ‘which language are you speaking?’ —hearsay Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal … the good poet welds his theft into a whole feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn....1 —T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

How was literature defined in the 19th century? Was literature defined according to a specific genre? Did some generalisable quality define all literature? And what was its relationship to language? Recent work in literary studies has articulated some of these issues—whether in relation to the status of fiction, expression, the way adab came to define literature in 19th-century Egypt or the way languages develop literatures.2 If one follows Jonathon Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), for example, it appears as though there is little happening between romantic theories of literature in the late 18th to the early 19th centuries and the early to mid20th century, especially with regards to lyric poetry—and observation that echoes classic work on ‘expressive’ theories of literature such as M.H. Abrams.3 Rather than revisit the works of various 19th-century persons, such as Pierre Gautier, Jules Michelet, Charles Baudelaire, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and John Ruskin in order to disprove or disagree or even agree with Culler’s work, I am interested in what happens when we follow romantic or expressive theories of literature and rout them through India, in order to demonstrate how the colonies were conduits between romantic theories of language and literature 43

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and newer theories of language (and literature) that emerged in the early 20th century, especially in the wake of persons such as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). How did we—and I speak now as a critic and literary historian amongst other similarly disposed persons— transition from romantic theories of language to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) or for that matter, to someone like Roman Jakobson, whose essay ‘Linguistics and Poetics’ (1958) is still harping upon expressivity, connotation, among other things, in addition to his Saussure-inspired distinctions between syntagmatic and paradigmatic? In writing about the colony as that theoretical link, this chapter argues that theories of language and poetics from Sanskrit enabled European theories to move out of the 18th century and into the 20th. That is, the colonies gifted various theories of poetry and language to revitalise the European metropole and pull it out of its theoretical belatedness. This chapter charts the fortunes of ‘literature’ and ‘literariness’ as concepts in western India, especially with regards to poetry. It does so to provide a crucial link between late 18th- and 19th-century romanticism and early 20th-century theories of language and literature. But I do so in a way that connects the topics contained here— concepts of literature and poetry—to global currents and their worldly dimension in contemporary scholarship. I draw upon the lexicon of ‘world’ and ‘worldliness’ from recent and slightly older work in literary studies, especially Pheng Cheah’s distinction between the ‘world’ as an ontological category and the ‘globe’ as a space within which literature circulates. But my point here is not to reinforce that genealogy, but rather almost to forget it, until the very end of this article, in order to deploy alternative, rooted (worldly) but nonetheless connected (global) conceptual bases for analysis.4 In the first half, I describe and analyse the parameters of ‘literature’, as a concept in western India, its theoretical and practical underpinnings. Most consequential to literature’s definition is a tradition of wandering, bardic poets known as śāhīrs (sg., pl. śāhīr; adj. śāhirī), who became the basis of a romanticist scholarly intervention in the 1870s that defined literature specifically in relation to its laukiktā or worldliness—a worldliness laden with qualities of the here and now, rather than a transcendent other-world. In Marathi, the ‘literary’ came to be defined first and primarily through and against śāhirī poetry, and nearly synchronously with the colonialinstitutional practices and romantic poetic theories briefly alluded to above. I describe and analyse these simultaneous processes in the second and third sections of Part 1 with reference to Marathi language and literature. In the latter half of this chapter, beginning with ‘Beyond Romanticism’, I move away from the śāhīrs and instead approach an

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important figure in Marathi scholarship, Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar (Viṣṇuśāstrī Cipḷūṇkar; 1850–1883), who was instrumental in outlining a definition of literature that placed śāhirī poetry at its core, building upon the romantic discourses of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744– 1803). Given the pervasive discourse of colonialism as a ‘gift’ from the coloniser to the colonised (a gift horse into whose mouth we should peer), I speak about the ‘regift’ from the colonised to the coloniser via Chiplunkar.5 If orientalist discourse was part of the intellectual contexts of the early and mid-19th century, the late 19th and early 20th unabashedly tried to bury the importance of the colonised’s gift. Using Chiplunkar’s analysis of śāhirī poetry, I wish to exhume that gift to highlight contributions from the colony to ‘theory’. My purpose and goal of this literary history, then, is two-fold: to find vocabularies of worldliness and globalism within the discipline of comparative literary studies that rely on alternative and intersecting genealogies than the (German–idealistic) versions available, and to define them in a more precise way that enables the real imaginative contours of the colonised’s gift (to the coloniser) to shine. As Padma Rangarajan writes, ‘In the realm of colonial exchange, the essential power of a gift (and especially a regift) lies not in the object itself but in the interpretive force of its transmission.’6

PART 1: WHAT WAS LITERATURE? In order to understand how romantic theories transformed the way Indian intellectuals began to think about literature in Indian vernaculars, it is worthwhile to acknowledge the overlapping and distinct qualities of what ‘literature’ was, conceptually speaking, in South Asia before the 19th century. In the wake of contemporary world-literature debates, this is particularly important given that literary exchange is not a recent phenomenon limited to the postcolonial world, but has taken place in the past, during the 19th century and earlier. Our contemporary and universal category of ‘literature’ conceals and subsumes a diverse array of literary cultures and their ‘products’ within a dyad of writing and reading that may not always be comparable with each other without such an ontological refashioning. Such universalisms, writes Aamir Mufti, and the circulation of literature through translation, ‘is predicated on, and helps to reproduce, reading publics oblivious to the possibility of historical alternatives in the past or the present, even and especially in the Global South.’7 In this section and throughout this essay, I attempt to describe how earlier forms of literature became the ‘literature’ we understand today.

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Before the 19th century was no satisfying translation of ‘literature’ that captures the term’s full semantic range in the Marathi language. But one finds approximate terms that, instead, enable us to interrogate contemporary discourses of worldliness and its relationship to literature. ‘Literature’ is a misleading synonym for two terms used interchangeably in Marathi to denote something akin to the concept of ‘literature’: vāṅmay and sāhitya. The first, vāṅmay, is a nominalisation of the verbal root √vac of ‘speak’ from Sanskrit with the suffix maya or ‘made of/ consisting of ’. Together, they combine to suggest a meaning of vāṅmay as ‘that which is spoken’. Even the modern verb ‘to read’ in Marathi is vācaṇeṃ, yet again deriving from √vac. Curiously, this is not the most common root for ‘read’ in Indian languages though at least Gujarati (vān̄cavuṁ) and Malayalam (vāyikkuka) share it, even though the latter is not a Sanskrit vernacular. Most Sanskrit vernaculars instead use a derivative of √paṭh or ‘read’. Hence paḍhanā (‘to read’) in Hindi, paṛatē in Bengali, paṛhana in Punjabi. These subtle semantic modulations tangentially point to differing notions of literacy in South Asia, and also prompt us to more carefully distinguish between regions of what is now India (rather than see any one region as representative), where graphic literacy was often seen as a notch below the virtuosity of grammatically correct oratory and speech. As Pollock points out, ‘the learned man in ancient India was the vāgmin, master of speech, and not, as in Europe, the litteratus, the lettered man’: vāgmin too is derived from √vac.8 And the name vāgmī—the feminine form of the noun—is a fairly common modern name too, signifying ‘eloquence’. The vernaculars, however, are different from Sanskrit, but even when the precolonial bard performed in Marathi, he had his notebook of composed poetry called a bāḍ but only used it as a reference guide. The real authority lay in the performance.9 Let me restate that differently: literature was a live performance event, spoken and heard in public, not usually read in the privacy of one’s home. Similarly, in legal and political settings in early modern western India, the oratorical performance was conspicuously more important than what may have been written down, and often impressed upon and changed the written word.10 In this way, it does make sense to think of the Marathi vāṅmay as something carrying the legacy of Sanskrit. But vāṇmay is ontologically unique in one sense: owing to the way it was performed and public, vāṇmay had, and still has, a world-making potential that is immediate with audiences and poetperformers co-present. Vāṇmay is a concept that persists to this day, albeit now reduced in usage, either specifically in reference to oral literature, or synonymously with sāhitya, the second term, in popular discourse. Sāhitya is the more inclusive term found in the names of official literary societies all over India, but its usage is also more recent.

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Even though in contemporary usage, it is synonymous with ‘literature’, here too, we encounter several unique and complicating differences that also intersect with notions of worldliness, perhaps in a way that is more precise than the term ‘literature’ itself organically permits. Semantically, sāhitya can be quite ambiguous and doesn’t even appear as a standalone term for literature (of any sort) in the definitive 19thcentury Marathi dictionary, except in the compound form of sāhityaśāstra or the science of sāhitya with reference to the Sanskrit discourse on literature, grammar and poetics.11 Tulpule and Feldhaus too, in their dictionary of old Marathi, define the term through Sanskrit, referring primarily to rhetoric and literary style rather than literature itself.12 Sāhitya’s misleading root is √dhā or ‘put’ whose past tense can take the form hita; with the prefix sa or ‘with’, it becomes akin to ‘put together with’ something. As a noun, sāhitya can also be a tool or implement required to produce something.13 Both dictionaries list multiple definitions of sāhitya as a tool or implement. With an adjective, for example, it can refer to specific tools or implements, as in pūjece sāhitya, the tools/implements/utensils for pūjā or svayaṃpākāce sāhitya, cooking utensils. Like the word ‘Sanskrit’ itself meaning ‘perfected’, sāhitya too contains an element of artifice as though someone has made it so. Moreover, sāhitya’s usage first becomes prominent in late classical Sanskrit literary theory, not in kāvya or epic poetry.14 In modern usage, it gains currency specifically after the establishment of the Mahāraṣṭra Sāhitya Pariṣad or Maharashtra Sahitya Council in 1906. The Mahāraṣṭra Sāhitya Pariṣad was an organisation that became deeply invested in language politics over the course of the following decades in terms of agitation for a Marathi speaking, linguistically defined state, as well as a university for Marathi-speaking people— Pune University—established in 1949.15 Significantly, sāhitya bears some noteworthy attributes that distinguish it from vāṅmay that are relevant here for how we understand literature, especially world literature that circulates: because it has been constructed or assembled through human artifice, there is a sense of objectification in sāhitya. Literature as an objectivised thing: the literary text as an art object rather than an event. Unlike vāṇmay and performance events that are ontologically bound within a time and space, sāhitya, as an object, is designed to circulate. In Marathi, a clearer delineation between vāṅmay and sāhitya enables the contextualisation of a literary culture in which literature and language before 19thcentury print culture were primarily spoken, relying on the manuscript only at a secondary level. Following the explosion of print culture in 19th-century India, concomitant with romantic ideas about literature, literature in the Marathi language gained one extra definition—that is,

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whereas vāṅmay offered temporally and spatially bound experiences of the world, sāhitya offered an objectified, detached representation of the world. Unlike manuscript culture, print culture enabled sāhitya as literature to be objectified and detached so that it could circulate more easily. In these distinctions, I see the problem of ‘literature’—caught between something locally situated with a concrete audience and something otherwise, designed to extend beyond its point of origin. The former ‘worldly,’ the latter ‘global.’ During the 18th century, the Peshwas or brahman ministers, who were de facto rulers in most of western and central India, provided a surfeit of funds for the reproduction, copying and revival of Sanskrit learning. Some Peshwas and wealthier secondary potentates even maintained a scribal workshop (pustakancā kārkhānā) and prominent families took great interest in obtaining, collecting and also commissioning new manuscripts.16 Reading, however, was not always a private affair and was often either accompanied by a scribal attendant or performed aloud to commit texts to memory.17 Thus even the well-versed blurred the lines between speaking and reading. The more popular Marathi literature of the same period was similar to and different from the study of manuscripts. Frequently involved in processes of representing political authority, it couldn’t afford to remain isolated in scribal workshops or private collections, especially if it wanted to fulfil its purpose in public—and it was often also performed at court.18 Śāhirī poetry, an extensive tradition of itinerant bardic poetry that emerged from the late 17th century and gained momentum in the 18th, has been touted as emblematic of popular and worldly (laukika) literature in this regard. Owing to its association with historical figures, such as King Shivaji Bhosale (1627/30–1680), who is known for carving out an independent Maratha state in western India, śāhirī poetry is often referred to as authentic Marathi tradition. ‘One reason for the sharp increase in śāhirī poetry under the Marathas was its ability to perform this ideological task [of representing power] and its increasing closeness to sources of political patronage,’ writes Prachi Deshpande.19 While I am not specifically interested in representing power, Deshpande’s statement articulates the social relationship constituted through practices and situations of poetry, not simply between the poet and his audiences but a more triangular one, with nodes at the political authority, the poet and the people. This triangulated social relationship capitalised on the ability of poets to compose poetry for public performance, temporally and spatially bound, not for private, detached readership: vāṅmay not sāhitya. Vāṅmay could not be made into an objectified, circulating literature, sāhitya, without transformations in print technology and literacy, which would in turn also transform social relationships constituted by that literature.

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The Social Worlds of Vāṅmay The social world of the Marathi śāhīr kindled imaginations and possibilities far surpassing the representation of royal and aristocratic power. Even as those representations of aristocratic and royal power have been fundamental to the historiography of Maharashtra and have been the topic of major debates in 20th-century Indian historiography,20 scholarship has been surprisingly reticent and tepid when it comes to poetic content that is not explicitly about political prerogatives, nor religious in nature, nor pure entertainment. That is, what is one to make of poetic content that is communicative, but perhaps light on the other aforementioned qualities? Such is the poetry I wish to examine below. One of the implicit reasons for circumventing attention away from communicative content in past scholarship seems to be related to what Michael Cohen has identified in his work on travelling poets in 19th-century America: the …poems seem to have no intrinsic value as ‘literature’—their meaning and value lay in their social transmission, the way they retold scandals or disasters to a group gathered to hear them sung. Aesthetic distinction, formal or linguistic complexity, and the celebration of universal or national ideals are not criteria of merit because consuming (‘reading’ seems not the right word) a peddler’s poems offered other kinds of pleasure.21

I bracket the ‘national’ in Cohen’s words, but find his observations about social transmission, scandal and disaster particularly telling. Our ability to understand poetry as something other than an aesthetic, readerly and therefore a literary experience does not account for the kinds of works that were often germane to the world of vāṅmay. It is such events (scandals, disasters, deaths, victories and so on) that historians have identified to tell a ‘poetic history of the Marathas’—and yet, as Cohen remarks for a different context, there is pleasure in the collective reception of song that seems to remain obscured—that is, there is some aesthetic even so, which needs to be found.22 Among the various genres of śāhirī poetry, the heroic povāḍā that valorised the deeds, qualities and victories of rulers, and the overplayed, erotic lāvaṇī constitute the most actively researched.23 But one finds a host of quotidian associations in collections of śāhirī poetry that cannot be reduced to heroic povāḍā nor the erotic lāvaṇī. These remainders surpass/bypass political representation as well as the censoring eyes of bourgeois morality, which from the early 19th century has slowly attempted to erode the mainstream legitimacy of lāvaṇī.24 Collections and anthologies of śāhirī poetry, right from the 1890s onwards, often approach the work categorically, thinking through the thematic

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resonances of their poetic ephemera. In postcolonial scholarship (in Marathi) on Rām Jośī (1762–1812), a prominent śāhīr, we see an emphasis on at least five different ‘types’ of lāvaṇī: (1) those describing and praising Gods (daivat-varṇan-par), (2) erotic lāvaṇī on themes from the Purāṇas (a large body of religious writings), (3) erotic lāvaṇī on laukik or popular/worldly themes, (4) lāvaṇīs that offer advice and (5) yet another category containing lāvaṇī on a variety of topics, basically unclassifiable.25 So too with even the earliest, colonial-era commentators on the śāhīr I wish to discuss here—Parśarām. Commentators similarly divide Parśarām’s oeuvre into several categories without even a clear distinction between povāḍās and lāvaṇīs: (1) devāncyā lāvaṇyā (lavanis about gods), (2) aitihāsik povāḍe (povāḍās about history), (3) sphuṭ ḷāvaṇyā (literally expanded or revelatory lāvaṇīs about social conditions, advice and so on) and (4) sādhyā ḷāvaṇyā (‘common’ lāvaṇīs about love and eros).26 It is useful to think of these many themes and the poems designated within them as constituting social relationships through poetic practices rather than poetry that ought to be, or even ever was, read in a literary manner.27 Here, I share one of Parśarām’s poems, a historical povāḍā, ‘Mumbaīcā Povāḍā’ or ‘A Povāḍā about Mumbai’ with reference to a few others. Parśarām lived between 1754 and 1844 and was able to witness the last vestiges of late premodern, precolonial, life, even though we cannot specifically date this particular povāḍā. His ruminations, rather than a representation, alert us to the way poetry served as an information economy, carrying news from the peripheries to the hinterlands. Mumbaīcā Povāḍā28 cāl: dupār majalā jhālī jāū dyā gharīṃ sāsu ghālīl vādu duṣṭa mājhe dira bhāve he kādhitīl mājhā śodhu pahā beṭāvar vastī basvilī daryāncetirī caubhautī jaśī lankā rāvaṇācī dusrī koṇī koṇālā na cāhatī rājya rākśasī pratyakśa jetheṃ pāpāce parvat hotī cauyugānce doṣī prāṇī avtārūn tetheṃ rāhtī tyat pārsī kiristāv bāṭūn hotī lakśāvadhi jīva jantu paśupakśī khātī tāḍīmāḍī surāpāṇeṃ ratīb narnārī rāvarank samsamān uncanīca ekankārī pāyapiṭī ḍoīcā gāḍā tar mama-īcī vastī barī helpāṭī jar karūna rahāśīl caughānmadhī mātabarī pāyapiṭī (refrain—final two lines) 1st stanza ---

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kaḷā kuśal hikmatī jāṇatī mātīceṃ kartīla soneṃ śāstranyāy danḍa karāvā ādhīṃc kaḷe hoṇeṃ jāṇeṃ moṭhamoṭhe rangamahāl unca unca sājiravāṇeṃ rangī berangī lāūn glāseṃ cakcakīta bhautī āyneṃ tyāmadhīṃ manuṣya na miḷavūṃ ek khāsā vancarā parī pāyapiṭī (refrain—the two lines from above) 2nd stanza (rough) translation: harmony: It’s afternoon, let me go home, my mother-in-law will start something my evil brothers-in-law will seek me out Look, on the island a town’s been fixed, shining sea on all four sides as in Ravan’s lanka, where each kept away from the other Kingdom of demons in place where sin’s mountain stood Foul animals from all four ages having descended, stay there With Parsis and Christians divided evenly Eating living creatures, animals and birds, by the hundred thousand The men and women grown pale through a fattening diet and alcohol the prince and the pauper, high and low, all alike and one If by the taxing labour of women, then my own town is better If you live by labour, perhaps still only one in four are respectable (refrain final two lines) The clever know artifice transforms soil into gold First forbid justice and science, to know the workings Large, large glassy palaces, taller and taller decorations colourful fixed glass and shimmering mirrors around in them, you’ll find no man, but a genuine predator instead (refrain)

‘Mumbaīcā Povāḍā’ begins with an imperative, pahā!—Look!—and proceeds to compare the city of Bombay to Lanka, the legendary capital of the demon-King Ravan from the Ramayan, which is entirely apart and self-sufficient or without deep social ties. On the island of Mumbai, we find a population that is either inhuman themselves or prone to inhuman behaviour—the dark and sinful animals of all four ages, having descended (avtārūn), live there. Among them, you find Christians and Parsis evenly distributed, and we learn that these two, too, are barely

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human, for they eat other animals, fowl and living creatures by hundreds of thousands. Moreover, they have grown pale through feed—the word refers specifically to food given to animals—and the overconsumption of tāḍī-māḍī—palm-tree- and other liquors. Overall, the poem offers such mostly negative descriptions of the breakdown in social structures only to come to a moralising conclusion towards the end—that if one must live by such laborious struggle, then one’s own town is preferable because in Mumbai one profits only by leaving behind śāstra-nyāya, morals and justice. Such a characterisation of Mumbai sets up worn tropes that persist well into independent India and the film industry— about Mumbai as a space of possibility but also degraded morality and social relations.29 While one finds large entertainment houses with tall decorations and glassy mirrored surfaces, these appearances only conceal a predator (vancarā, literally ‘forest-walker’) inside—perhaps a predatory spirit. That is, the city is all surface glamour and glitz that will eat you away on the inside. Several aspects of this poem indicate that it is neither poetry meant to be read nor poetry that one would re-read as with many poetic genres. Indeed, most of the existent śāhirī poetry was neither meant to be read nor meant to be apprehended outside of specific, mostly performance-based and historical contexts with event horizons and direct communicative possibilities. And the lexical topos of śāhirī poetry reveals as much: the Marathi term is śāhirī vāṅmay, literally ‘that which is spoken by the poet’ rather than the term used across literary institutions in India: sāhitya, which means ‘put together’ [with something else] or assembled, as mentioned above. If momentarily, we think about śāhirī poetry not as a literary artefact or object (sāhitya) but rather as a communicative medium that established a social relation (vāṅmay, ‘that which is spoken’), then we may ponder its specific worldly function more carefully. Rather than an object that circulates in various consumerist economies in search of more numerous audiences across the ‘globe’, this poetry retains an entirely different ontological status—it is not a commodity like any other and cannot be exchanged in the same way. Within the event horizon of performance, the poem is a direct means of communication between the śāhīr and his audiences; the poem would have been performed along with others on a variety of topics—heroic ballads about warriors and various aristocratic personalities (common povāḍās), lyrics about love in separation and even more racy ones about love in union (common lāvan.ī), others offering advice on a whole host of topics—marrying old, marrying young, having kids, having daughters and sons—all these and many more would have shared the same performance space. That is, the poetry was a vehicle in a reflexive, socially imaginative process, reframing and

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reimagining topics from all aspects of daily life within the collective and intimate proximity of social peers and others. The povād.ā provides an imaginative ontology of the world, delineating Mumbai as a special case of dislocation, social mixture, moral degradation, all contrasted with the stable categories that presumably exist in small towns. At the same time, this poem is neither an instruction manual nor similar to a textbook: following Cohen, the shared space of reception also raises an aesthetic question, despite the relatively anaesthetic and unreaderly qualities of the poem. How would this informational poem have been received? The prefatory material notes a ‘cāl’ or harmony. In this particular povāḍā, as in others, rather than a specific musical notation that provides us with an intimate ‘hearing’ of the povāḍā’s sound, the poet gives us the first couplet and refrain from a risqué lāvaṇī (that I, unfortunately, haven’t been able to locate) in which a married woman implores her lover to let her go because it’s getting late: ‘It’s afternoon, let me go home, my mother-in-law will yell and my evil brothers-in-law will search for me.’ That is, ‘Mumbaīcā Povāḍā’ should be sung with the harmony of a lāvaṇī about an extramarital affair. Such intermingling of harmonies from a poem about a salacious extramarital affair is quite common among these poets—and it prompts us to rethink how ‘Mumbaīcā Povāḍā’ may have been apprehended. Surely, it wasn’t meant to be read but the borrowed or stolen harmony is an indication of the aural-mnemonic modes through which a message or news became something more than simply a message or news, exceeded itself, through which news gained aesthetic content and became ‘sticky’—to borrow from Sara Ahmed.30 Such relational aesthetic qualities insinuate this mostly anaesthetic, informational povāḍā into the pleasure economy as well. They make the povāḍā pleasing to hear through a sleight of harmony, conjuring up a sensuous extramarital affair while articulating the laukik affairs of the socio-political world. Ultimately, Parśarām’s ‘A Povāḍā about Mumbai’ is, as the name suggests, a descriptive and provocative account of the city, its inhabitants and its structures, most likely from the early- to mid-19th century before it became the second-largest city in the British Empire. But Parśarām wrote other such povāḍās too—one specifically about the English, another called ‘In the Dark Town’ or andhāṛ nagarī and others. In two, he additionally criticises Indian kings for neglecting their duties, thus also showing a split between courtly patronage and that of a more popular kind. His criticism of kings also connects with notions of aristocratic degeneracy in the later 19th century (see Chapter 3 for more on this). In ingrajāncā povāḍā, ‘A Povāḍā about the English’, for example, he writes that just as when the heat of the sun rises, the stars disappear: ‘tase pṛthavītīl nirvīrya rāje śūratva āngī gele karpūn’

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or ‘similarly, in the unheroic kings, courageousness withered in [their] bodies’31 when the English came. In another, titled simply Povāḍā, he asks, ‘Aāndhār nagarī bebanda rājā nyāyanitī kaicī [How (can there be) justice and order in the dark town (of an) anarchic king]?’32 Such povāḍās paint a different picture of heroism; other poets, especially Rām Jośī, wrote such informational poetry too.33 Parśarām’s ‘Mumbaīcā Povāḍā’, along with others, thus speaks from the margins of the povāḍā genre, offering an account of a situation outside the purview of the court, about a worldly, laukik topic as is common in the genre. We may begin to define worldliness through some classical distinctions before refining it further. Pollock writes, In the conceptual universe in which vyākaraṇa (grammar, or perhaps more strictly, language ‘analysis’) arose and functioned as a foundational intellectual discipline, a strong distinction was drawn between two kinds of action: instrumental and this-worldly, and non-instrumental and other-worldly (dṛṣṭārtha or laukika and adṛṣṭārtha or alaukika).34

In this formulation, laukik proclamations always had communicative possibilities in this world, whether as political discourse, for example, or something else. ‘Mumbaīcā Povāḍā’ isn’t a ‘povāḍā’ in the traditional sense: it is not a song about heroic male historical figures and is therefore not part of a representational and symbolic economy of patronage politics, which was common during the 18th century.35 Rather, it is communicative and instructive, instrumental even, in its approach to the world. It is about this world, not some world hereafter, and it intervenes in this world. Even though the residues of patronage do seep into Parśarām’s other poems, this poem, as well as many others, alert us to the way poetry served as information and affect the economy, carrying news between the hinterlands and various urban centres.36 Strangely, scholarship on the povāḍā has theorised worldliness— laukiktā—without taking note of these ‘informational’ poems, choosing to focus on heroic historical povāḍās and less so on their sister genre of lāvāṇī. The lack of consistent theorising is all the more surprising given these informational poems do not easily fit into narratives of masculinity and nationhood nor of eros and sexuality, but at the same time still document the transformation of various social relationships and historical realities.37 Furthermore, notions of laukiktā or worldliness are even more identifiable in these povāḍās, perhaps even more so than in those about heroic historical personages. This is in part because such poems are not strictly representational but they actively participate in the creation and dissolution of ideas in public. What would be the effect

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of thinking about the povāḍā genre—including the historical povāḍās— as primarily informational and communicative? That is, what are the contours of this kind of worldly/laukik poetic instrumentality? As the 19th century wore on, it became apparent that global networks brought new genres to South Asia and the literary world simply grew larger, whether because of strange prose fiction called novels, poetry with differing metrical attributes or because of travelling theatre troupes: different ‘epics’, different lyrics and different dramatics. But for urban, predominantly brahman, intellectuals who were part of a slowly consolidating colonial state and its educational apparatus, an influx of new literary genres also became an occasion to revisit Marathi and Sanskrit poetic traditions. Indeed, as the quotations from Chiplunkar below will demonstrate, this revisitation is part of a global zeitgeist of philosophical historicism and Orientalism. As Aamir Mufti has reminded us, philosophical historicism and Orientalism are inseparable from each other.38 Śāhirī poetry was exemplary in this regard. It has been touted as emblematic of both popular and worldly (laukik) literature (vāṅmay) in this regard and as a historical stage in the development of literature. Marathi as a Poetic Language Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar revisited śāhirī poetry early in his career and repurposed it for integrating romantic theories with Indian poetics. Because śāhirī poetry contained accounts of courts, heroes, and mundane affairs of the world, Chiplunkar and later writers have considered it laukik, an adjective that denotes both its popular appeal, and on a secondary level, a kind of rooted worldliness. Both popular and worldly, śāhirī poetry easily combined with romantic tropes in Chiplunkar’s thought. His writings emphasise this worldliness and they contain tropes that are unmistakably global in their formulation. Romantic dogmas such as Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ or Emerson’s ‘For it is not metres, but a metremaking argument, that makes a poem…’ are implicated in Chiplunkar’s thought along with William Jones, Herder and Kant. For this reason, it seems that expressive literatures, long considered foundational for romanticism’s worldliness, are, because of Chiplunkar, simultaneously foundational for Indian vernacular literature and language studies too.39 The historiography that fails to see the latent and overt romanticism in vernacular language theories in India also fails to capture the doubly communicative and aesthetic dimension of language politics of the mid- to late-19th-century milieu that constituted the worldly dimension of language.40 Romantic thinkers were not, as Sumathy

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Ramaswamy has remarked in her book about Tamil, simply ‘prophets of (European) linguistic nationalism’, especially given their global afterlives.41 While there was no overt ‘Ossian’ or ‘Herderian Revolution’ in western India as elsewhere in the world,42 some of its defining outlines remain quite conspicuous in essays and prefaces in Marathi languages texts from the late 1860s onwards. Indian intellectuals were far better read than they receive credit for. Much of Eric Gidal’s appraisal of Herder, ‘Immediate presence—whether it be the oral recitation of vernacular poetry … or the lived experiences of a people united through memory and tradition—provides Herder an authority for literary aesthetics in the modern world’, remains salient for Herder’s afterlife in India as does Gidal’s quick explication of the Ossianic theme.43 Further themes such as divisions between ‘classical’ and romantic literature,44 religious and secular writings, literature as expression and the invention of tradition (to borrow Hobsbawm’s phrase) to compensate for a perceived lack (as has been analysed and explicated convincingly through psychoanalysis)45 have a structuring presence in the writings and ideas of Marathi-speaking intellectuals. Chiplunkar, however, also carefully defines romantic and poetic ‘expression’—the aspect that exceeds the text—arguably more systematically (and elegantly) than his romantic brethren back in Europe and is more adroit with his use and (re)combinations of poetic theory. Theory, therefore, is the unacknowledged—or underexamined—‘re-gift’ to Europe at the end of the 19th century as I discuss towards the end of this section and article. The variety of poetry referred to in the preceding pages—that of the Marathi śāhīrs—was the accommodating ground of literary debate, revealing intricate intimacies and defining divergences within a global circuit of ideas, most of which converged on romantic ideologies. Vishnushastri Chiplunkar isolated the tradition of śāhīrs as something special in Marathi literature precisely because of their proximity to ‘worldly’ affairs and later scholars drew upon Chiplunkar in turn. In general, Chiplunkar was one of the first to suggest that Marathi, as a language and literature, was worthy of study at all. He severely critiqued the old pandits in colonial India for caring only about Sanskrit, berated the new ones for having their heads chock-full of English and also suspected the missionaries for valuing and damning Marathi religious literature in one stroke: Marathi bhakti—a form of affective piety— was great but misdirected towards the wrong god, Viṭṭhal, and not to Jehovah.46 Instead, Chiplunkar articulated the significance of the Marathi śāhīrs and placed them within a global romantic discourse that became, by the 1920s, a point of departure for ‘volkishness’ and other fasci-nationalistic discourses.47

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There was only a small coterie of intellectuals in Pune when Chiplunkar began writing, only a few interlocutors—Dadoba Pandurang Tarkhadkar (Dādobā Pāṇḍuranga Tarkhaḍkara), Mahadev Moreshwar Kunte (Mahādeva Moreśvara Kunṭe) and Kashinath Balkrishna Marathe (Kāśinātha Bālakṛṣṇa Marāṭhe)—none of whom zeroed in on the problem of literature in the same way as Chiplunkar.48 Chiplunkar was part of a generation of scholars with diverse options owing to their literate caste backgrounds who, taking up the ‘gift’ that was colonialism, instantiated a critical tradition in Marathi out of a need for self-definition in the aesthetic domain.49 A ‘shastri’ by lineage and by claim, rather than ‘Master of Arts’, Chiplunkar was an insider in all the significant ways. Krishnashastri (Kṛṣṇa Śāstrī), his father, had begun a career as a Marathi translator for the colonial government before becoming an assistant professor of Marathi at Pune College (which would eventually become Deccan College). In 1850, Krishnashastri was appointed to the literary Dakshina Prize Committee and in 1865, he became the principal of Pune Training College.50 V. Chiplunkar himself frequented and joined the literary circles of his father’s orbit and entered Deccan College himself in 1866. At Deccan college, he became familiar with English literature, especially Marathi poetic literature, and began his comparative studies.51 During his time there, the son helped his father with the magazine Shālāpatrak or School Newsletter, wherein Vishnu Shastri published his essay on poetry, ‘Kavitā’, that inaugurates some ways to think about śāhirī poets. (In addition to poetry, later critics credit Chiplunkar as a foundational figure for Marathi language studies as well as history.)52 ‘Kavitā’ is divided into four sections—a general introduction on poetry, English poetry, Sanskrit poetry and Marathi poetry—and each resonates with major concerns in 19thcentury literary studies and our own scholarly moment. In revisiting Chiplunkar’s essay, I attempt to move beyond isolationist literary histories so that I may chart the mutations and genealogies of gifting and re-gifting across spans of space and time. Chiplunkar frames his general introduction around tropes that resonate with romantic movements globally. These tropes are conspicuous even in translation. We find a healthy admixture of German romanticism—thematic tidbits of Herder and Kant appear in his writing. But if one reads only for those moments, then one may also overlook the more Sanskritic moments of Chiplunkar’s ideas about poetry, moments in which European romanticisms, partially having been founded on William Jones’ thought, reconnoitre with currents in Sanskrit aesthetics. It is this process, of gifting, receiving, re-articulating and re-gifting that forms the basis of this section, with a bi-and-multi

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directional flow of ideas between the colonised and the colonisers. In the essay, Chiplunkar writes: koṇtyāhī rāṣṭrāt pāhū gele astān ase āḍhaḷte kī, te rāṣṭra sadñān daśes yeū lāgle mhanje tyāce vicār kavitā rūpāne pahilyāne bāher nighū lāgtāt. tī kavitā pahilyāne lāvaṇyāsārkhyā vṛttāt aste, kāraṇ taśyā kālcyā uddāma kavitodgāras taśīc vṛtte atyanta anukūḷ astāt. Tyāt bahut karūn vīrāncī adbhut kṛtye, va tyāncī caritre hīc varṇilelī astāt.53 Having observed any nation, one realizes that once that nation begins to come into knowledge [rāṣṭra sadñān daśes yeū lāgle], then it firstly utters its thoughts in the form of poetry. That poetry is firstly with qualities akin to a lāvaṇī [lāvaṇyāsārkhyā vṛttāt], because those qualities are most appropriate [atyanta anukūḷ] for the turbulent poetic utterances of that time. For the most part it contains marvelous deeds of heroes [vīrāncī adbhut kṛtye] and descriptions of their lives.

Following this, Chiplunkar briefly mentions Homer and also English and Scottish Ballads. His omission of the epics Mahabharat and Ramayan is hardly suspicious—they are not about national (read: modern Marathi) culture, but rather something more classical. Once we read further, this is all explained: Āplyā deśāt tarī peśvyāncyā kārkīrdīt hoūna gelelyā vikhyāt puruṣānvar kelelyā jyā lāvaṇyā kinvā povāḍe āpaṇ aikato tec vāstavik pāhatā marāṭhī bhāṣecī ādya kavitā hot. kāraṇ vāman paṇdita, moropant, vagaire kavīnnī jarī marāṭhī bhāṣet āplī kavitā lihilī, tarī tī sanskṛt bhāṣecyāc kevaḷ dhāṭaṇīvar aslyāmuḷe tīs marāṭhī kavitā mhaṇaṇyāpekśā sanskṛt kavitece rūpantar mhaṇaṇe he vājavī āhe.54 Even in our nation, the lāvaṇīs or povāḍās that we hear about renowned men from the past who were in the Peshwas (late premodern Maratha State’s) service, those can be seen as the true earliest poetry in the Marathi language. Because even though poets such as Vaman Pandit, Moropant, etc. wrote their poetry in Marathi, because it was fashioned only in the Sanskrit language, rather than call them Marathi [language] poems, it is proper to call them translations of Sanskrit poetry.

In addition to his casual dismissal of the pandit-poets (pandit-kavis) Vaman and Moropant,55 we encounter yet another problem here: Chiplunkar omits any mention of the bhakti (devotional) traditions of Maharashtra, let alone of India, that have primarily operated in

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non-classical Indian languages. This too is understandable: those are not ‘secular’ poetry but rather directed towards salvific ends. Also, the tradition of bhakti in Maharashtra was predominantly a non-brahman practice at the time.56 Eventually, even though later poetry retains some of its masculine (mārdavādī) characteristics, it loses some of its splendour, the main reason because: sṛṣṭītīl sundar kinvā bhavya padārthāncā, va sansārātīl nānā prakārcyā prasangī hṛdayās jyā vikār hotāt, tyāncā ādhīcyā kavīnvar kā ṭhasā uṭhlelā asato titkā puḍhcyā kavīnvar nasato, va tyāmuḷe pahilyās tyā goṣṭīnce jase hubehub varṇan kartā yete tase puḍhlyāsa yeta nāhī … sarva rāṣṭrāt agdī junāt kavic sarvotkṛṣṭa asatāt … pahilyānnī manovikārāce udbhāvan vagaire jase agdī sahaj rītyā kele asate tase puḍhlyāsa ... nāhī. In creation’s beautiful or sublime things, and the various occasions of the world, the heart’s arousal; the impression of these things is greater on the earlier poets than the later poets, and because of that the first [poets] can make colourful descriptions of things in ways that later poets cannot … in all countries, the earliest poets are the best of all … the way the first poets manifested/brought forth [udbhāvan] a mental transformation, so effortlessly fashioned [sahaj rītyā kele], not so with later [poets].

As I mentioned above, many of these statements traverse the broader outlines of romanticism. They are unusually specific and it would be a misreading to deny their writer’s conversance with romantic tropes. The sentiments Chiplunkar expresses are indeed reminiscent of Herder’s insistence on the poetic foundations of a people’s spirit or volkgeist and either Burke or Kant, though more likely Kant. They’re about nations coming into knowledge (sadñāna daśesa)—essentially out of their infancy as in Kant’s essay ‘Was ist Aufklarung?/What is Enlightenment?’ (1784), which begins with Kant’s famous quip about emergence from self-imposed immaturity.57 The poetry of such nations consists, firstly, of lyric poetry which he implicitly equates with lāvaṇī (there’s more than a little work to be done on historical poetics here). And these lyrics have a proclivity for turbulent (uddām) effects (vṛttī; plural vṛtte). One of the more persistently turbulent qualities pertains to the way heroes (sg. vīra) and heroism occupy an important place within the poetic imagination—as with Homer or even English and Scottish ballads. So too in the Marathi language, wherein povāḍās and lāvaṇīs about heroes also mark an originary point for the language’s poetic utterances (kavītodgār). (Of course, Chiplunkar is at least partially mistaken in these assumptions as I mentioned above, but it is important to sustain

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his logic to see where it leads.) And yet, the inclusion of ballads, a term he transliterates into Marathi and equates with lyrics and lāvaṇī, confirms some of the romantic inheritances of his ideas. Finally, in a heavily Burkean/Kantian mould—it’s not apparent which, nor does it particularly matter—Chiplunkar further stipulates that only the first poets are able to express their intimate communions with creation’s beautiful and sublime things (sṛṣṭītīla sundara kinvā bhavya padārtha). The echo of the Burkean-Kantian language is difficult to ignore.58 The first poets are unique because they have a qualitatively different relationship with nature’s beauty and sublimity. More precisely, these materials have impressed upon the earlier poets to a greater extent than the later ones (ādhīcyā kavīnvara jitakā ṭhasā uṭhalelā asato titakā puḍhacyā kavīnvara nasato). The earlier poets are closer to the world, not just in terms of their ability to absorb the beautiful and sublime occurrences of the world, but also the ‘various types of events in the world’ (sansārātīla nānā prakārcyā prasangī). They are porous in relation to the world beyond a normal capacity and their poetry bears this experiential, ontological reality in a sustained way. To put a Herderian spin on this, it seems as though Chiplunkar wants to say that their poetry is more spontaneous rather than self-conscious.59

PART 2: BEYOND ROMANTICISM Chiplunkar proceeds one step further in order to posit a relationship between the poet and the world: ‘the first poets have only their intellect (buddhī) with nothing else for support, and so their thoughts emerge in the mind (manḥ), whereas later poets have the support of [the first poets’] earlier poetry’: ‘pahilyā kavīsa tyāncyā buddhīśivāy dusre kāhīc sādhana nasalyāmuḷe tyānce sarva vicār kevaḷa manḥpreritac astāt.... [dusryānnā] pahilyānnī kelelyā kāvyāncā ādhāra asto....’60 That is, the earlier poetry is experiential, whereas later poetry is, by interpretation, discursive, relying on the (published?) work of earlier poets. Perhaps, we may further add that the earliest poets are worldly, laukik, whereas later poets benefit from the circulation of earlier poetry. Comments like these also underline the differences between something like vāṅmay as opposed to sāhitya. The former is immanently situated whereas the latter departs and is dislocated. Following these brief excursions into the qualitative nature of the first and latter poets, Chiplunkar moves beyond romantic theory, beyond a theory born at least substantially in William Jones’ encounter with Persian, Turkish and Arabic sources. In moving beyond romantic theory, it is evident

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that not all of Chiplunkar’s thought is a mixed bag. Chiplunkar’s use of buddhī and manḥ, and his repeated use of various forms of rasa (a discourse on the aestheticisation of feeling in poetic, dramatic and other creative works) attests to his self-styled title of ‘Shastri’ or one learned in the scriptures. He repeatedly describes the rasīk or ‘taster’ of the poem, akin to connoisseur, but within a Sanskrit idiom. Such vocabularies transform the terms of discourse from one imported with German romantic and Jonesian ‘expressive’ legacies into one situated within an Indian philosophical and poetic-aesthetic epistemology. Through Chiplunkar’s subtle and complex intellectual engagements, we see a gradual transition in both definitions of literature, as well as an ecological change that I spoke about in the introduction. We see the different Sanskrit philosophical–aesthetic paradigm, most clearly in Chiplunkar’s definitions of what good poetry generally is. Later in the essay, after speaking about the pure experiences of the first poets, Chiplunkar identifies three kinds of poems that form the basis of his observations and ruminations on poetry more generally. The first kind contains only the expression of innermost qualities/ emotional states (antḥkaraṇāce svābhāvik udgāra). Without wordy and purely formal poetic techniques/formalisms (alaṃkār), ‘this kind of poetry is very captivating for its simple and pure form’: ‘tice sādhe śuddha svarūp tyā veḷes phārac ramaṇīya disate’.61 That is, the most important qualities in poetry are the non-formalist moments, especially when it expresses deeply, yet retains a simple and pure form. The second kind of poem regresses in Chiplunkar’s eyes, restrained by formalisms, even though the poet still has an ample supply of ‘expression’ more generally. However, if the poem has no heart-melting (hṛdayadrāvak) qualities, no supply of expression but only poetic devices or formalist techniques, the term ‘poet; is not befitting the poem’s writer. The passage departs from commonplace European romantic accounts even as it retains an important place for ‘expression’ more generally. And, to these moments, he speaks about the sensitive, porous and aesthetically open reader, the sahṛday, and his place within this system, especially in ensuring poetry remains expressive, rather than simply formal. Most importantly, Chiplunkar’s usage of terminologies such as poetic devices or techniques (alaṃkār) underwrites his theory of expression. In essence, he argues that formalism in poetry is empty insofar as it cannot emote, let alone emote appropriately, and further that good poetry is emotive and expressive irrespective of its formal qualities. I suggest that for Chiplunkar, we may go one step further with the term ‘emote’: true poetry lies beyond the pale of the literal.

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Some of these ideas of what good poetry ought to be may seem to overlap with Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow’ or even Emerson’s ‘metre-making argument’ that I quoted above. Those connections are indeed possible though hard to confirm. In her work on English fiction in Indian libraries, for example, Priya Joshi notes that data on what people actually read remains incomplete and unreliable, even though book imports from English peaked in the late 1860s.62 A Calcutta printer D.L. Richardson did publish a volume entitled Selections from the British Poets in 1840, which contains both biographical entries as well as the poetry of all the canonical romantic poets—Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as Keats, Shelley and Byron—except, for obvious reasons, William Blake, who did not become canonical until much later.63 And Chiplunkar himself mentions these five Romantic poets in his own essay on English poetry.64 In all likelihood, he read at least some of their poetry. Neither the sketches from Selections from the British Poets nor the anthologised works, however, contain Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. The colonial state, however, emphasised English literature first and foremost through poetry ‘with essays and drama following’.65 This seems fitting—given that poetry was the pre-eminent form of literature in the 19th century. In a strange twist, I discovered that Wordsworth’s grandson William Wordsworth was principal of Deccan College from 1862 to 1874.66 Did he assign Chiplunkar his grandfather’s essays? Did he introduce Chiplunkar and others to German Romanticism? Such proximities invite speculation, of course, but whether Chiplunkar’s notions of expressivity owe to Wordsworth or not, they still remind us of Romanticism’s sprawling global reach via paradigms of Orientalism and philosophical historicism, given that ‘expressivity’ is seen as a link via William Jones to Hegel.67 And so too, do Chiplunkar’s words leave us seeking more. Significantly, however, Romanticism was not Chiplunkar’s only inheritance. His thought also owes something to a conceptual framework adapted from Sanskrit philosophy, aesthetics and linguistics. And here we must pause to disagree with Aamir Mufti’s assessment about Indian intelligentsia, which is based upon his understanding of 19th-century Bengal and from which he generalises: Thus, when the colonial-nationalist intelligentsia began gradually to emerge in different parts of the country from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it found fully formed a body of writing understood as ‘Indian literature’ and a body of knowledge and cultural system for configuring language, literature, and culture in national terms.

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Furthermore, Mufti argues that Bengali intellectuals like Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Keshub Chandra Sen and Swami Vivekananda were ‘enthusiastic’ readers of Orientalists, who had ‘invented Indian literature’.68 Needless to say, as I explained in the Introduction, India is a diverse place and its experiences of colonialism, too, were diverse. It has been a disservice to studies of colonialism to generalise too much about other regions or the whole ‘country’ based upon the experiences of a single region. Can we similarly generalise about the whole of Europe based on Italy or about the whole of Africa based on Nigeria? Unlike Calcutta, where the British gained a significant foothold and control after 1757, in western and parts of central India, the decisive date is 1818 when the Maratha Confederacy fell. The Maratha confederacy had, owing to its model of governance, patronised Sanskrit learning by giving gifts to brahmans throughout the 18th century, some of which I referred to above. Many of the literati and intellectuals from the precolonial Maratha confederacy transitioned into offices for the colonial government, as I write in Chapter 2, and, the colonial government repurposed funds from gifts to brahmans to establish Poona College, which later became Deccan College. Chiplunkar’s great-grandfather and grandfather were such persons who switched offices between governments. While orientalist learning did indeed transform the way Sanskrit pandits understood Sanskrit texts, the relationships between Sanskrit pandits and the Orientalists were much tenser in Pune—not quite so fawning as Mufti paints with regard to the Bengali intelligentsia.69 But more to the point, one cannot dismiss the numerous commentaries and critical traditions that existed in Sanskrit before oriental learning. How else did Radhakant, the pandit who pointed William Jones towards Śakuntalā, know that ‘The ring of Sacontala [sic], concerning which the fourth act, and four stanzas of that act, are eminently brilliant, displays all the rich exuberance of Calidasa’s [sic] genius?’70 Furthermore, when one reads prefaces and newspapers, such as the example I give below of Dr Jacobi in Pune at least, the pandits and Orientalists were quite often at odds. Nor can we say that the pandits and other literate communities such as prabhus were a homogenous group. Each of these responded differently to the colonial/Orientalist construct of knowledge and power. Within South-Asian studies, there is a lively debate about the extent to which various sociological and discursive formations came into being as a result of colonial power, and it isn’t so settled as Mufti’s work casually asserts. Rather than orientalist learning as a densely discursive realm that cannot be seen beyond or through, and which overwhelms all its Indian readers and interlocutors, instead, we encounter a problem in

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literary historiography. How do we interpret Chiplunkar’s recycling of a centuries-old paradigm from Sanskrit in the face of romantic theorists who had, just a few decades before, reinvented the wheel? Or, at least, theorised something so similar? As Jonathon Culler notes, Western literary theory has neglected the lyric and, until the romantic era, treated it as a miscellaneous collection of minor forms…. Lyric was finally made one of three fundamental genres during the romantic period, when a more vigorous and highly developed conception of the individual subject made it possible to conceive of lyric as mimetic: an imitation of the experience of the subject.71

It seems, then, that romanticism provided Chiplunkar with some fodder to revisit and recombine ideas from India’s past with contemporary thought on poetry. Chiplunkar’s engagement with Sanskrit sources is not overdetermined by orientalist learning, but it is demonstrative of his recombinant approach to those sources and his (partially) English education. As I mentioned earlier, Chiplunkar’s romantic expressivity is relevant for Romanticism’s broadly global genealogies, precisely because of connections between William Jones and Hegel. But Chiplunkar also goes beyond such genealogies: his writings are underwritten by a conceptual framework adapted from Sanskrit philosophy, aesthetics and linguistics. We do know at least what one of his sources was—the Kāvyaprakāśa (Light on Poetry) of Mammaṭa, dating from the 11th-century ce. The Kāvyaprakāśa has proved to be a major, perhaps the major, text on aesthetics from the second millennium. ‘No other work on the subject has been remotely as popular or influential,’ writes Pollock, and it ‘has been preserved in thousands of manuscripts all across India, and has attracted scores of commentators beginning as early as the mid-twelfth century, one of whom, as late as the eighteenth, refers to Mammaṭa in all sincerity as an ‘incarnation of Sarasvati, goddess of language.’72 Surely, many of the pandits involved in higher learning retained some knowledge and memory that passed through the colonial rupture? Far from the abstraction that it may seem, the Kāvyaprakāśa was used as a particularly relevant example of a Sanskrit text in the early 1880s that any student of Sanskrit ought to know. I permit myself a slight detour to explain the Kāvyaprakāśa’s serendipitous and important place here, before returning to the śāhīrs, poetic expression, and Chiplunkar. In 1881, Professor Kielhorn (see also Chapter 4), the Sanskrit chair at Deccan College, retired from his position. The search was on for a new chair of Sanskrit to teach at India’s pre-eminent institution of

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higher studies in the classical languages. But even though the leading candidate, Dr Jacobi, was trained in the most faddish German milieu of comparative philology, he was a scholar of Jainism. Like his predecessor, he commanded yet another highly undesirable flaw. As an anonymous contributor to the Mahratta newspaper writes: These German professors, when they come to India possess but a scanty knowledge of Sanskrit and most of their time is employed in learning from natives rather than teaching the natives. The three German worthies that have occupied the professorial chair in our colleges till this time were better collectors of Sanskrit MSS than teachers of Sanskrit, and at least while in India have never lectured on philology and other comparative sciences … except some very obvious of cases.

He then goes on to critique another fellow, Peterson, mentioning, ‘… and after 8 years [Peterson] has become nothing better than what he was previously, a mere Panchatantravala’, referring to a Sanskrit series of fables normally taught in elementary first-year Sanskrit classes in our own, present day.73 Academic burns aside, these comments point to the way the colonies served multiple functions in the 19th century: to better one’s educational credentials or learn Sanskrit; they were places of knowledge extraction (with reference to manuscripts and learning from pandits) among others. Without a doubt, they highlight how different the relationships between Sanskrit pandits in Pune were with Orientalists from those of the Bengali intelligentsia, at least if one goes by Mufti’s account. In any case, one week earlier, another contributor, T.K.K., raised some similar doubts more relevant for this essay, romanticism and expression. T.K.K. mentions, …to suppose that an eminent philologist or a scholar, who has made the study of Jainism the sole object of his life, as Dr. Jacobi, the coming successor of Dr. Kielhorn, is represented to be, can teach Kadambari or [sic] Kavyaprakash to the satisfaction of the students or sufficiently to meet the requirements of our University, is simply absurd.74

Much about this Sanskrit chair position is, of course, beyond the scope of this article, but we are given the tiniest glimpse into curricular debates that implicate Mammaṭa’s Kāvyaprakāśa as something that was taught and known at the time. And it may have been the pandits who taught the text, rather than the Sanskrit chair(s), who preferred to copy, steal, collect, but rarely had ideas of their own—much like Saussure a few years later.

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Returning to Chiplunkar’s own essay ‘Kavitā’, his own social life within and without Deccan college and his three criteria for poetry, it is easy to see that he did have the benefit of having learned from the Kāvyaprakāśa in his own studies—though apparently not from Kielhorn nor any other European ‘Panchatantravala’. Chiplunkar follows the prompts from the Kāvyaprakāśa interpretively in order to categorise poetry into three types. Mammaṭa too, the Kāvyaprakāśa’s author, categorises poetry along three distinct lines. In the first and best kind of poetry, a suggested meaning (dhvanī; lit. ‘sound’) dominates the expression: ‘the poetry in which the suggested meaning dominates the expressed is poetry of the best kind, called “Dhvani” by the learned’.75 Here, suggested meaning takes us beyond the literal words spoken (or written on the page), requiring us to interpret the text. A lesser poetry retains ample suggestion but also relies on formalisms to convey meaning: ‘When the suggested meaning is not dominant, as described above, the poetry is of middle excellence, and is called the Poetry of Subordinate Expression.’76 Finally, Mammaṭa tells us what the third kind of poetry is: one which is non-suggestive and only contains fanciful words and devices.77 These three, coming at the very beginning of the text, conform relatively well to the three defining characteristics laid out by Chiplunkar in his own essay on poetry. We thus see a focus on expression, specifically the suggested or interpretive meaning, as something beyond the mechanical operations of a given poem. Both Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow’ and Emerson’s ‘It is not metre making…’ are quite different in this respect from what Chiplunkar and the Kāvyaprakāśa say. Chiplunkar, it seems, has transformed the ‘suggestion’ of the latter into the ‘expression’ of romanticism, while keeping intact the relationship to formalism (alaṃkāra). These tripartite schemas may seem somewhat abstract and inapplicable to ‘A Povāḍā about Mumbai’ specifically, but revisiting it, it is worthwhile recalling the way the aesthetics of the harmony may impress upon audiences an ominous message indirectly. And, one may also consider the expressive-instrumental poetics through which even such a purportedly anaesthetic poem as ‘A Povāḍā about Mumbai’, designed not with a reader in mind but a contemporary listener, transforms an intimate account of a feeling poet’s experiences in the world for a contextually rooted and relevant audience. Parsharam’s other poems even more so. He sings about Mumbai’s establishment, its geography, its people and their habits. And he remaps all of these within a kind of metaphysical–moral reality that is ambiguous at best: ‘tyāmadhīṃ manuṣya na miḷavūṃ eka khāsā vancarā parī’ reads the final line, ‘in it, you find no human, but one true beast (vancarā) instead’. Interpreting this poem is about conveying the poet’s horror,

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dismay and disgust with the experience of Bombay within specific performance-oriented settings whose ontology is one of conveyance and communication. Parsharam’s poem invites his audiences into a shared space where they are interpolated through his observations: ‘Paha!’ or ‘Look!’ begins the povāḍā. It thus instructs them, shows them. The poet here is the moral guide, the entertainer, the observer and the one whose position in relationship with his audience is both intimate and distant: he is and is not one of them. Not being one of them permits him to travel extensively and gather such experiential knowledge and also return to his former haunts; he remains aloof from normal society as a bard but is intimately connected in other ways. It is this liminality that enables him to offer advice and perform songs on a range of topics. And this liminal condition that makes him an organic intellectual in a Spivakian sense as the subaltern that, literally, can be heard (not necessarily an intellectual of an ascendant social class),78 just as he (or one such as he) speaks from the past to Chiplunkar’s ears, from the bard to scholar before romanticism became inflected with nationalism. The Re-Gift I wish to return to Rangarajan’s statement quoted above about how ‘the power of the regift lies not in the object’—the literary object in her case, sāhitya, in ours—‘but in the interpretive force of its transmission.’79 The question that has haunted me, since I was a graduate student, is, what is the philosophical force of Sanskrit (philology, philosophy, literature) on literary thought more globally during the 19th century? Such a question is salient for multiple reasons, historical and contemporary. If Orientalism significantly contributed to European self-definition, then forgetting the place of the colonies, and Sanskrit in this case, reeks of a kind of ethnonationalism in theory. Another pertinent question concerns our contemporary academic discourse. How do postcolonial critical works, such as Rangarajan’s, that offer lively theoretical language, further erase intellectual traditions of the Global South (however privileged they may have been in their setting, such as Chiplunkar) in the name of critiquing figures such as Jones, Müller, Monier-Williams, the Mills, etc.? How are we to respond to her book, which is richly textured with theory, but only focuses on European hegemonic actors?80 If indeed her book is about an economy, about giving, receiving and giving again, then why are there so few less hegemonic actors in her book, from whom the re-gift was received and forgotten? The problem with her study is that while she acknowledges how resentful and dismissive Jones and Müller were of ‘native’ interpreters of Indian texts who guided them along the entire process, she expends little effort in thinking about those very

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persons who gifted knowledge to colonisers in the first place.81 And this process, of dismissing the expert ‘native’ was quite ubiquitous in the 19th century, implicating Rangarajan in a well-worn colonial practice. For example, colonial officials frequently imported trained animals from India, especially camels, asses and elephants, but loathed their native trainers—who definitely were not from the privileged castes—without whom training could not be reproduced elsewhere.82 Another example can be found in the work of William Dwight Whitney, the founder of the American Philological Association, itself an outgrowth of the Classical Section of the American Oriental Society, who similarly eschewed the interpretations of those invested in various ‘Indic’ epistemologies. His biographer, Stephen Alter, somehow manages to omit any specific mention of how Sanskrit ideas permeated into Whitney’s thinking, despite Whitney’s 600-page magnum opus on Sanskrit grammar and a compendium volume about Sanskrit verbal roots.83 Where is the re-gift coming from, then? Returning to Chiplunkar’s departure from the standard romantic scripts of soulful expression to a more precise understanding of exactly what that expression is in linguistic and aesthetic terms, one comes across some curious footnotes in the Kāvyaprakāśa. Chiplunkar’s position barely scratches the Kāvyaprakāśa’s surface. Perhaps it does not even get that far. The tripartite schema in the Kāvyaprakāśa is followed by a rigorous understanding of grammar in which Mammaṭa also carefully delineates what ‘expression’/implication/suggestion is in a variety of different scenarios, upon which theories of rasa rest, from which Mammaṭa finally addresses poetic language appropriate for rasa. For example, Mammaṭa defines suggestion as: Suggestion is that function of the meaning, which brings about the cognition of another meaning, by persons endowed with imaginative intuition, through peculiarities of the speaker, the person spoken to, intonation, the sentence, the expressed meaning, the presence of another, the context, place, time, and so forth....84

Suggestion can only be grasped through imagination and contexts of interpretation. This is obviously not the place to address all of these issues, but a curious scholar of poetics should probably at least browse through the contents for a dizzying and sophisticated understanding of poetry to contrast with say, Roman Jakobson.85 And yet, a few illuminating moments do speak to how, if we retain the kernel of ‘interpretive force’ from Rangarajan (and ‘force’ from Cheah) a wider world whose bearings are Sanskrit theory gradually comes into focus.

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Perhaps, the most conspicuous moment where we may recall some familiar theoretical language comes a little bit later in the Kāvyaprakāśa, where the translator explains an important concept, the ‘apoha’ or ‘negation of the contrary’ in order to excavate the substratum of the aesthetics of expression, itself based on linguistics. A particularly Buddhist view, ‘apoha’ goes something like this: ‘Yet others (Bauddhas) have held the view, that what is denoted by the word is the “Apoha”, i.e. “the negation of the contrary”. [e.g., what the word “ox” denotes is “the negation of the ‘non-ox’, this view being in accordance with the Bauddha theory that there is absolutely no positive entity in the world”.]’86 Coming in the second chapter about words and their meanings, all in the service of what constitutes ‘expression’ more generally, one cannot help but hear the resonances of structuralism, drawing us back into our undergraduate and graduate days when we all had to read Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics and learn about binary oppositions.87 And in fact, Saussure was himself a student of Sanskrit, having published and written about the Genitive Absolute construction for his doctoral dissertation, in which a writer may utilise the genitive case to construct what would be the past continuous tense in English, about an ongoing event in the past: while x was happening, y happened.88 He also lectured on Sanskrit for nearly three decades after he received his doctorate. Some recent work has further elaborated this point, in ways that help us understand how Saussure’s long engagement with Sanskrit fundamentally must have shaped his understanding of language. For instance, Buddhists were unconvinced, unlike brahmans, that words recited properly refer to the things themselves. Words referring to the things themselves were an idea necessary to properly understand the Vedas, but not for Buddhist thought. Buddhists instead created the idea of the apoha precisely because it functioned, through exclusion, as if words referred to the things themselves. Johannes Bronkhorst explains this to further how Dignaga (480–540 ce) developed the idea of the apoha: Here Dignaga’s apoha theory provided an answer.... However, the apoha theory creates something that is as good as universals but without ontological implications. Put briefly, the apohavāda claims that words do not directly denote anything whatsoever: words exclude. The word ‘pot’ excludes everything that is not a pot. Functionally this is as good as the acceptance of universals. The word ‘pot’ in ‘the potter makes a pot’ does not correspond to anything in the situation described, because that is the way words work. No strict application of the correspondence principle is therefore possible, and the problem that occupied so many others does not exist.89

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As Bronkhorst explains, the idea of apoha enabled a situation in which even though words do not actually refer to their objects specifically, they do exclude all other objects. By virtue of exclusion, their relationship is more with other words themselves, rather than with the objects they describe, which is less significant. If we acknowledge Saussure’s ‘accidental’ plagiarism—as one major beginning to a vast discourse on linguistics, literature, structuralism and so forth, that develops in the 20th century, then we ought to further examine what other Sanskrit theoretical constructs about language and reality have to offer for us today. We ought to bring those back into discussion with the structuralists and poststructuralists who engage deeply with language. One example immediately comes to mind: take J.L. Austin’s notion of ‘felicitous’ performative utterances. Performative language, for Austin, is felicitous if it is uttered in the right contexts—and only then can it effectively alter reality. What is the Sanskrit of the Vedas, at least for the brahmans of antiquity, if not performative language uttered in a ritual context, the speaking of which makes it so? No wonder then, that the Buddhist proposition of language was threatening! Furthermore, within the course on general linguistics, especially in the section on phonology, Saussure is obsessed with where sounds come from within the mouth—something he could have only understood from Sanskrit, which has, for millennia, grouped letters according to where their sounds come from within the mouth. More subtly, Saussure’s focus specifically on sounds and their meanings in spoken language should remind us of the way the literate person in Sanskrit was the vāgmin, as I noted above. From this context, Saussure is hardly the original ex nihilo thinker he is made out to be in courses on theory. Rather, he piggybacks on a linguistic system that was developed differently, and whose engagement was productive for him. It is quite disappointing that Perry Maisel and Haun Saussy’s 2011 edition completely ignores these contexts too, preferring to declare, ‘Saussure presents a solution to the problem … that stretches back to Plato….’ while paying no heed to Saussure’s study of Sanskrit, upon which he built his understanding.90 If we must wonder about re-gifts, then we must also consider the real degrees of mutual influence that oscillated between India–Europe– India–Europe in the formation of many of our modern ideas and disciplines in the repeated misreadings—or unacknowledged thefts (in Jack Goody’s words), especially on the part of European ‘scholars’—of Sanskrit texts and linguistics more broadly.91 Saussure himself relied upon William Dwight Whitney’s Sanskrit grammar, a well-known fact that critics of Saussure and structural linguistics seem to have forgotten. Indeed, Pollock writes that many foundational assumptions of Western modernity itself drew upon Sanskrit linguistics—with figures such

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as Franz Bopp, the aforementioned Whitney and Saussure, Emile Benveniste, Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky actively utilising this tradition of thought in their own work.92 Beyond (well-founded) rhetoric, however, some subtler details also evince some startling and dubious similarities—as noted by Vinay Dharwadker in his work on Rasa, whose terms overlap with theories of affect that began to emerge in the 19th century, or Trautmann and Baxter in their work on phonology and morphology.93 The ‘interpretive force’ evident in Chiplunkar’s own understanding of poetry then is the same as the one that shaped the many persons above and their many ideas, though unacknowledged. Pollock’s recent volume, A Rasa Reader, a selection of theories of Sanskrit aesthetics, shows just how fundamental Sanskrit linguistics was to its own system of aesthetics. And, it shows how over a period of more than 1,500 years, Sanskrit aestheticians interrogated many fundamental questions that have emerged in post-Saussurean structural (especially Russian formalism, Jakobson et al.) and post-structural literary theory, especially given that Saussure’s foundations were significantly also rooted in Sanskrit.94 Such subtler exchanges, I hope, will be the topic of a more complete world-making literary-historical study. For now, we should seek to take Saussure away from the ‘West’ just as Freud sought to take Moses away from the Jews.95 And perhaps if we follow some of the references above, we’ll realise that some of our foundational assumptions about literature and language aren't ‘Western’ at all, only arriving there belatedly, or accidentally, when theorists conveniently forgot where their ideas came from. Worlds, Again, Finally I began this essay by asking what ‘literature’ was in the 19th century, for whom and in what genres. Given colonialism’s operations, I foregrounded the place of the Marathi śāhīr through whom persons such as Chiplunkar defined ‘literature’, especially poetic literature in a literary culture that had no conceptual equivalent to ‘literature’. Rather, literature was (and perhaps still is) of two kinds: vāṅmay and sāhitya. While associations and organisations herald sāhitya in their names, the many-volumes history of Marathi literature uses vāṅmay, itself a testament to the way literature-as-sāhitya is a recent phenomenon in the Marathi language. The one connected, rooted and transformative; the other an object that may circulate outside its station without much hassle, functioning along multiple dyadic axes: writer–reader, source language–target language, reality and representation. The tradition of śāhīrs, their experiential knowledge, absorbing and recasting their observations, was the basis of a worldly definition of literature, one in

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which the word and the world were connected obliquely: the world was that which was implied in the word, that which exceeded the literal, within a clearly delimited space: vāṅmay. By contrast, sāhitya was a relatively new term, whose prominence rose as the 19th century advanced, utilised precisely to accommodate that which could not be encompassed by a strict definition of vāṅmay, whose all-too-concrete audience meant that vāṅmay’s circulation was far more limited than a text within discourse. As I mentioned in the introduction and with reference to Chiplunkar before, the transition from a panchoric literary ecology to a vernacular one ensured a new orientation towards literature, in which literature’s very scope expanded. Vāṅmay didn’t disappear but rather became one aspect of a larger field within the vernacular language that came to be known as śāhitya. Curiously enough, as these discussions show, neither poetic theory, nor the concepts of literature per se were in any way caught in some kind of waiting room of history— rather, these currents defining and constituting literature were global and largely synchronous, as I further explicate in the following chapter, and they may speak to the belatedness of theory in some parts of the world, but certainly not in South Asia.96 And indeed, the influence of the colony for theories and practices in the academies of the Global North is so extensive that we should at the very least teach theoretical influences alongside the theory itself. One way to do so is to return to vāṅmay and the way Parśarām processed the goings-on in Bombay, elaborated them and then recast them for his audiences using a semi-mythical language of predatory animals, prey some reference to epics, through a performative act. In this sense, it goes beyond the simplicity of mimesis as verisimilitude and description, it goes beyond representation. It is precisely this quality of being something more than description and representation, having something more to do with the affairs of the world than simply chronicling or representing them, that scholars and critics, including Chiplunkar, identified—an excessive quality to literature that remains after one has accounted for the literal. But Chiplunkar gave it a founding in grammar and theory that is fundamental for 20th-century linguistics. The connection between vāṅmay and laukiktā or worldliness is precisely about literature’s instrumental agency within the world, to shape it, give it its full dimensions. But I forget—how could I? —yes, that Chiplunkar drew on a lot of romanticism to do so, from which he departed in succinct and specific ways, refashioning romanticism within a concrete Sanskrit poetic nexus. His concrete poetics was, and perhaps still is, through its broader intellectual contexts, part and parcel of the contemporary scholarly world. That nexus needs to be excavated for new and more accurate literary histories to emerge. Read

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the Kāvyaprakāśa, use it in your classes, tell the editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism to incorporate selections from it and other Sanskrit linguists and grammarians copied by the Orientalists, structuralists and formalists!97 Such a move is indeed necessary, because it breaks the facile notion of Western tradition and canonicity apart, simply by demonstrating that the lines of tradition are indeed not so straight as has often been posited. One is tempted, therefore, to follow Pheng Cheah’s worldliness to describe the śāhīrs instead of Chiplunkar—as was I—or for that matter Debjani Ganguly’s residuum, surplus and immanence among others, but mostly for their occluding ease.98 It is easy to ride that gravy train, whether to construct or deconstruct. And I believe one may be tempted to use such a theory to describe many similar processes globally. Both Cheah and Ganguly refer to Derrida and Husserl, and both invoke Thomas Pavel’s work on genre, normativity and also fictional worlds.99 (Amusingly enough—Pavel acknowledges the impact of Chomsky’s grammar, and implicitly, the long-submerged legacy of Sanskrit on his own early work!)100 But to use them reinscribes the history of erasure that has accompanied a perceived belatedness of theory in the Global South. Cheah writes, ‘We cannot, however, undo the history of Western imperialism and colonialism by nostalgically recuperating romanticized precapitalistic pasts. We must instead patiently search for extant resources for reworlding the world.’101 And yet, even his own theories are, and always have been, implicated in processes that are not so straightforward as the genealogy he draws, surpassing their narrow German tradition, borrowing from others and giving to them too.

NOTES  1 T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921), 114, http://archive.org/ details/sacredwoodessays00elio, accessed 31 May 2018.   2 One finds a good overview of some of these parameters in Alexander Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day, 2015, 8–11.   3 Jonathan D. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 2015, 91–131; M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953).  4 For recent work, see Pheng Cheah, ‘World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature’, New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 303–329; Debjani Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel As Global Form (Duke University Press, 2016). For older scholarship, see Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, cop. 1986

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(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I prefer Cheah’s article (for its clarity) to his book: Pheng Cheah, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). I cannot tell how Cheah’s textual analyses in the book are different from a simple inter-textual reading and am not convinced that the theory in the introduction actually adds to the way he reads Amitav Ghosh, for example.  5 Mufti, among others, speaks about how Orientalism, as a discourse, framed colonialism as a ‘gift’ to the colonised, I take up his cue in this chapter as well as Chapter 4. For his most concise statement on the outlines of this discourse, see Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016), 110. For ‘re-gifting’, see Padma Rangarajan, Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century, 2014, 121–30.  6 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, 129.  7 Mufti, Forget English! 80, 92.  8 The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 83.   9 Christian Novetzke, ‘Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars’ Notebooks Suggest about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra’, in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield (Open Book Publishers, 2015), 179. 10 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Performance in a World of Paper: Puranic Histories and Social Communication in Early Modern India’, Past & Present 219, no. 1 (1 May 2013): 87–126. 11 James Thomas Molesworth, A Dictionary: Maráthı́ and English, 2d ed., rev. enl. (Bombay: Printed for Government at the Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1857), 499. 12 Shankar Gopal Tulpule and Anne Feldhaus, ‘A Dictionary of Old Marathi’, Dictionary, 1999, 746, http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/tulpule/. 13 Molesworth, A Dictionary, 499. 14 K. Krishnamoorthy, ‘The Meaning of “Sahitya”: A Study in Semantics’, Indian Literature 28, no. 1 (105) (1985): 66–67. 15 Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, Cultures of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 122, 244n.98. 16 Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 28–29. 17 Naregal, 33. 18 Bhanudas Shridar Paranjape, Arvācīna Marāṭhī vaṅmayācā itihāsa, I. Sa. 1800 te 1874 (Puṇe: Vhīnasa Prakāśana, 1997), 5; Deshpande, Creative Pasts, 40–70. 19 Deshpande, Creative Pasts, 57.

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20 An interesting place to begin this kind of investigation is Dipesh Chakrabarty’s The Calling of History—not for the book itself, but more of the responses it provoked in an issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). See in particular Novetzke’s response to the book, esp. pp. 350–354: Christian Novetzke, ‘Dear Dipesh Letters on The Calling of History’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 2 (1 August 2016): 347–354, https://doi. org/10.1215/1089201X-3603442. 21 Michael C. Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, 2015, 20. 22 See Ya. Na Keḷakara, Aitihāsika povāḍe: Marāṭhyāñcā kāvyamaya itihāsa (Puṇe: Ḍāyamaṇḍa Pablikeśansa, 2008). Kelkar and others such as Sardesai (see note 20 above) were invested in creating an alternative history, based on poetic sources, that ran against official colonial histories. 23 For an understanding of the erotic lāvaṇī, see Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘Performing Intimacy: Slavery and the Woman’s Voice in Eighteenth-century Marathi lavani’, South Asian History & Culture, 12, no. 2 (19 February 2021): 206– 221, https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2021.1878783. 24 Veena Naregal, ‘Performance, Caste, Aesthetics’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 44, no. 1–2 (1 June 2010): 79–101. 25 Rām Jośī, Vi. Ma Kulakarṇī and Gaṅgādhara Moraje, Rāmajośīkr̥ta Lāvaṇyā: prastāvanā, ṭīpā yāsaha sampādita (Puṇe: Padmagandhā Prakāśana, 1998), 19–23. If we consider other śāhīrs, Moraje lists even more content: see Gaṅgādhar Moraje, Marāṭhī lāvaṇī vāṅmaya / Gaṅgādhara Moraje., Sudhārita dvitīyāvr̥ttī (Puṇe: Padmagandhā Prakāśana, 1999), 58–64. 26 Parśarāma, Parśarāma Kavīcyā Lāvaṇyā: Gangathaḍita Miḷavilelyā Nivaḍaka Lāvaṇyā va Povāḍe Yanca Sangraha Sundara Citransaha, ed. Śāḷigrāma, Śankara Tukārāma (Puṇe: Bhāratabhūṣaṇa, 1907), 1–8. 27 Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, 7. 28 Parsharam, Parsharam Kavichya Lavanya, ed. Shaligram, Shankar Tukaram (Pune: Bharat Bhushan Chhapkhana, 1907), 2.10-11. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this article are my own. 29 One is reminded of the song ‘Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan’ from the classic Hindi movie C.I.D. (1956), in which the character Master, played by Johnny Walker, sings of the city’s missing dil or heart, and the absence of justice (insāf). 30 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 46. 31 Parsharam, Parsharam Kavichya Lavanya, 2.12. 32 Parsharam, 2.20. 33 Moraje, Marāṭhī lāvaṇī vāṅmaya / Gaṅgādhara Moraje., 23. For more of an overview, see also M.V. Dhond, Marāṭhī lāvaṇī (Mumbai: Mauj Prakāśana, 2003), 1–74. 34 Pollock uses this distinction in reference to kāvya, but I find it useful here to describe not what would be the equivalent of Marathi kāvya but śāhirī

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poetry instead. See Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 13, 46. 35 Deshpande, Creative Pasts, 57. See note 19. 36 For Parsharam’s performance circuits, see Ya. Na Keḷakara, Tantakavi tathā śāhīra (Puṇe: Di Ṭīcarsa Āyaḍiyala Pabliśiṅga Hāusa Li., 1952), 26–27. 37 Kelkar even denies Parsharam’s own categorisation of these as povāḍās and insists that they simply belong to a sister genre, the lāvaṇī, whose contours place it within a kind of lyric poetry. He also only refers to these at one moment in his voluminous scholarship. See Keḷakara, 29. 38 Mufti, Forget English! 74–75. 39 Romantic expressiveness is often traced to William Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages: To Which Are Added Two Essays: I. On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations; II. On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative (Clarendon Press, 1772). 40 Ellen E. McDonald, ‘The Modernizing of Communication: Vernacular Publishing in Nineteenth Century Maharashtra’, Asian Survey 8, no. 7 (1 July 1968): 589–606; Ellen E. Mcdonald, ‘The Growth of Regional Consciousness in Maharashtra’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 5, no. 3 (1 September 1968): 223–243; Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere. Also, given her topic, it’s curious that Prachi Deshpande does not engage with romanticism in her own book, Creative Pasts (2007), even though 19th-century writers (both literary personalities and historiographers) were steeped in romantic ideologies. Lisa Mitchell begins by hinting towards romanticism, but then doesn’t fully embrace what the consequences are. See Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Contemporary Indian Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 41 Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970 (University of California Press, 1997), 4. 42 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 77–79. 43 Eric Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age, Under the Sign of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 6–7, 28. 44 Mahadev Moreshwar Kunte (mahādeva moreśvara kunṭe) makes this distinction in the 1870s, following Herder, about everything that came before, and Romantic, that is, contemporary, poetry. See Prachi Gurjarpadhye, Bringing Modernity Home: Marathi Literary Theory in the Nineteenth Century (along with an Anthology) (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2014), 272. 45 Duncan is particularly astute in his psychoanalytic reading of why literati in nations across nations create their own myths of origin—out of a perceived lack of and jealous feeling towards others who have that thing, and are enjoying it: see Ian Duncan, ‘Spawn of Ossian’, in Global Romanticism— Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820, ed. Evan Gottlieb, 2016, 3–18.

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46 Vishṇu Kr̥shṇa Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, ed. Shrinivas Narayan Banhatti (Puṇe: Suvicāra Prakāśana Maṇḍaḷa, 1939), 71–84. 47 Benjamin Zachariah, ‘Global Fascisms and the Volk: The Framing of Narratives and the Crossing of Lines’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2 October 2015): 608–612, https://doi.org/10.1080/0085 6401.2015.1080404; Benjamin Zachariah, ‘At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2 October 2015): 639–655, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1078948. There is little work on the connections between volkisch romanticisms that goes into work by 19th-century intellectuals and literati, perhaps because such ideologies exist more in literary-theatrical-performative realms than the kinds of documents most prized by historians, as shown by Rashna Nicholson: Rashna Darius Nicholson, ‘Corporeality, Aryanism, Race: The Theatre and Social Reform of the Parsis of Western India’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 4 (2 October 2015): 613–638, https://doi.org /10.1080/00856401.2015.1080211.Among historians, Thomas Trautmann’s Aryans and British in India, for example, rarely ever brings in romanticism conceptually: Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2004), 40n.8, 60. 48 Gurjarpadhye, Bringing Modernity Home, 55–132. 49 Gurjarpadhye, 58–60. 50 Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, Indian Worthies (Bombay: Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, 1906), 121–122. I am not entirely sure if the Poona Training College was the same as Poona College. 51 Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, 126–131. 52 Keḷakara, Aitihāsika povāḍe, 1. 53 Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 5. 54 Cipaḷūṇakara, 5. 55 Vāman Paṇdit (1608–1695) and Moropant (1729–1794) were upper-caste, highly trained ‘pandit kavis’ from the 17th and 18th centuries. 56 Jon Keune, Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India, 2021, 67–102. 57 ‘Kant. What Is Enlightenment’, http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/ CCREAD/etscc/kant.html, accessed 14 July 2018. 58 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Nicholas Walker, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 59 Mufti, Forget English! 65. 60 Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 6. It is unclear exactly which philosophical traditions Chiplunkar draws upon, but in Samkhya philosophy, the mind (manḥ) contains sense organs, action organs, subtle and gross elements, whereas intellect (buddhi) ‘acts as both as the “will” of the individual and as the discriminating faculty: it is this which will “selectively ascertain particular sense objects”… Buddhi, the individual’s will and discriminatory faculty, is drawn towards the powerful I-maker as the focus of the

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individual’s experiential life….’ See Sue Hamilton, Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114–116. 61 Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 7. 62 Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 40, 50. 63 I found this reference in Rosinka Chaudhuri and Cambridge University Press, A History of Indian Poetry in English (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 6. See David Lester Richardson, Selections from the British Poets from the Time of Chaucer to the Present Day; with Biographical and Critical Notices by D.L. Richardson (Baptist Mission Press, 1840). 64 Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 9–26. 65 Joshi, In Another Country, 17. 66 ‘A Golden Era of History Rusts at Deccan College’ Pune News - Times of India, accessed 19 August 2021, https://timesofindia.indiatimes. com/city/pune/A-golden-era-of-history-rusts-at-Deccan-college/ articleshow/134146.cms, accessed 19 August 2021. I’m not quite sure that I agree with the author of this article—it may well have been the golden era of Deccan college, but neither Wordsworth not Woodhouse made it so. That distinction belongs to the pandits employed there. 67 Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 109. For William Jones’s theory specifically, see Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, 201–217. 68 Mufti, Forget English! 111. 69 Kedar A. Kulkarni, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India, 1790–1890 (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2022). 70 Kālidāsa, Sacontalá; or, The Fatal Ring: An Indian Drama, trans. William Jones (London: Charlton Tucker, 1870), 8. 71 Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 1. 72 Sheldon Pollock, Reader on Rasa: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2016), 224. 73 Anonymous, ‘The Sanskrit Chair’, The Mahratta, 25 December 1881, Sunday edition, 3. 74 K.T.T., ‘The Sanskrit Chair’, The Mahratta, 18 December 1881, Sunday edition, 1. 75 Acharya Mammata, KavyaPrakash of Mammata, trans. Ganganatha Jha (Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1966), 6, http://archive.org/details/ KavyaPrakash. 76 Acharya Mammata, 7. 77 Ibid. 78 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York; London: Routledge, 1996), 271–273. 79 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, 129. 80 I am aware that Vishnushastri Chiplunkar is himself a hegemonic actor in many ways—but he is one that acts in the vernacular, rather than English. A whole array of sources and controversies are visible within that

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vernacular, not English world. A study of colonialism and postcolonial criticism broadly, is yet to take these into account. 81 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, 117. 82 Pushkar Sohoni, ‘Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration: Animals and Human Knowledge’, Transfers Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 8, no. 1 (2018): 1–14. 83 Stephen G. Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language (Baltimore, Md.; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 84 Acharya Mammata, KavyaPrakash of Mammata, 40. 85 For a list of topics, see Acharya Mammata, 22–37. 86 Acharya Mammata, 17–18. Tom Tillemans seems to think that Saussure was not aware of the double-negative in Buddhist thought, but with Saussure’s work on Sanskrit and familiarity with Whitney, this seems unlikely. See ‘2.2.1 Dignāga’s  apoha’ in Tom Tillemans, ‘Dharmakīrti’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2017 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/dharmakiirti/, accessed 3 April 2017. 87 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 42–43. 88 Ferdinand de Saussure, De l’emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit (Genève : Impr. J.G. Fick, 1881), http://archive.org/details/delemploidugni00sausuoft, accessed 3 April 2017. 89 Johannes Bronkhorst, A Sabda Reader Language in Classical Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 67–68. 90 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, xv. 91 Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 92 Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 164. 93 Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyashāstra, Darwin, and Affect Theory’, PMLA 130, no. 5 (1 October 2015): 1381– 1404; Thomas R. Trautmann, ‘The Past in the Present’, Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts 1 (2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0001.002, accessed 3 April 2017; William H. Baxter, ‘Response to Trautmann’, Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts 1 (2011): 23, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.9772151.0001.003, accessed 3 April 2017. 94 Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘Emotion and Rasa in Premodern and Classical India’, Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 19 (13 May 2017): 30–32. 95 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism. Translated from the German by Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage Books, 1955). 96 I refer, of course, to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase describing most of the world as contained in the ‘waiting room of history’ in relation to Europe. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.

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97 To be fair, the editors of the Norton Anthology at least acknowledge the influence of orientalist learning, especially Sanskrit on Saussure—but I think the roots go deeper, and I encourage them to incorporate the non-west earlier than the mid/late 20th century. Without Sanskrit, there would be no Saussure, and without Saussure, we’d sure miss out on a lot of 20th-century theoretical discourse. How did Sanskrit theorists engage with some of the same concerns that various European theorists raised in the wake of Saussure, for example? See Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2018, 820. 98 Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 77–85. 99 Cheah, What Is a World? 4; Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 77–85. 100 ‘Thomas Pavel | Romance Languages and Literatures’, https://rll.uchicago. edu/faculty/pavel, accessed 31 May 2018. 101 Cheah, What Is a World? 12.

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2 FROM LITERARY COMMONS TO LITERARY CANONS …I sat poring over the crabbed characters and flourishing tropes of an Indian scribe.... —Charlotte Brontё, Jane Eyre Let’s have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it’s a poem because it’s swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it’s a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they’re saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing.... So stand back you crowded onlookers of prose. —Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

A few years ago, as the post-production of Padmavati (2018) was nearing completion, controversy about the eponymous heroine’s representation threatened to disrupt the film’s theatrical release. Roughly, according to political leaders claiming to represent all Rajput castes of Rajasthan, Padmavati’s actions were depicted as too forward and agential, rather than demure, and therefore not in accordance with patriarchal desires.1 The story of Padmavati, a 13th to 14th-century ce Rajput queen, is a topic of much historical scholarship that demonstrates how, with each successive historical period, caste and other political groups transformed the narrative to suit their own ends. Ramya Sreenivasan’s work shows how historical circumstances give rise to differing interpretations of the story in order to make it relevant.2 But history has shown that each era always reinterprets the past in its own image, and we all casually— glibly—know that all histories are also histories of the present. This is true as much for the rest of the world as it is for India. And yet, it seems that the controversies surrounding historical and epic figures are a more regular part of popular culture and discourse in India than in many other places. Whether something as mundane as the way the Maharashtra state parliament forbade liquor shops to be named after deities or historical persons, or yet another outcry over Sita, the heroine from the epic Ramayan, it seems that history, 81

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epic and religion, taken together, occupy a contested space within the popular imagination.3 It is a space that lacks clear demarcations, clear standardisation and everyone seems invested in correct versions of historical and epic narratives. Often, academics celebrate such a plurality. There is no dearth of volumes that describe the many versions of an epic as it circulates in Indian society, especially across caste, gender and regional lines.4 Similarly, in a recent edited ‘translation’ of sorts, Mahabharat: A Modern Retelling (2015), Carole Satyamurti includes an orally transmitted story in the prologue, of how Ganesh replaced his broken stylus with his tusk while recording Vyasa’s Mahabharat—because it is much loved— but the episode is not part of the text’s critical Pune edition!5 Critical editions of Indian epics, then, do not encompass the breadth of the epic tradition even as they are authoritative epic texts. It is this gap between the tradition and authoritative text that is central to this chapter. While it may indeed be true that epics constitute a tradition and a whole literature, rather than a single text, my purpose in pointing to these examples is not to demonstrate or find or re-analyse the epics texts and their many permutations again. Historians, scholars of religious studies, anthropologists and, of course, Sanskrit and Indian language literary scholars, all have amply demonstrated the many particularities of epic diversity, and I engage with some of this scholarship at various moments throughout this book. But I want to suggest another way to read contested narratives in the modern era, one that isn’t at odds with some of the aforementioned understandings, nor contrary to them. Here, while remaining alive to the insights offered in scholarship that considers epic diversity, I am instead attentive to how the 19th century witnessed a new ecology in which epic narratives could circulate: print. Print operates on principles of reproducibility, the performances of epic narratives do not. Performance, as Peggy Phelan writes, is independent of ‘mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and linguistically…’ and ‘live performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory’.6 All attempts to document it are only something other than performance. For, unlike a performance, whose ontology is made complete through its disappearance, leaving little afterwards, print operates, predominantly, by an absent event and a present material object.7 Readers are rarely present with authors when they write, enabling the fiction of a universal address for the printed word through circulation. Epic narratives, (still) known almost exclusively through their performances and televised media, however, were alien to the world of reading, at least where popular reception was concerned. In India, the new ecology of print relied primarily on the power assemblage of literate castes, colonial governmentality and, notably,

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the technologies that enabled the dispersion of the printed word: first lithographs and then type. Processes of documentation, editing and writing acquired new energies within a colonial milieu for consolidating a normative vision of Marathi ‘literature’. Past vāṅmay was significant for Chiplunkar’s reimagined sāhitya—the future of literature—enabling him to participate in a global conversation about romanticism and the hierarchies of language, as I wrote in the previous chapter. But contestations over literature and its specific form were not purely ideological endeavours as they were with Chiplunkar. The material processes of literature (such as lithographic and print technology) and institutional imperatives (education, colonial intervention) ecologically transformed literature too, rerouting forms of reception from collectivities such as audiences and spectators into private readership. This chapter traces changes in literary culture both from an institutional, colonial-educational point of view and also from a relatively more popular perspective, what would have been considered the superstructure and base in a prior idiom. Some of the prime movers within the former, official interveners, were a relatively homogeneous group of pandits who worked closely with the colonial Marathi translator in Pune. Pandits such as Parshuram Ballal Godbole (Parśūrām Ballāḷ Goḍbole; 1799–1874), the personal pandit to the official and second-in-charge Marathi translators James T. Molesworth (1795–1871) and Thomas Candy (1804–1877) certainly played a major role in shaping a canon of Marathi literature. Godbole and other pandits edited a Marathi dictionary and an anthology of Marathi poetry the Navnīt, athvā Marāṭhī Kavitānce Vece, or Selections from the Marathi Poets (1854; Navnīt hereafter). Both dictionary and anthology were important preliminary steps in the formalisation of language and literature—though my focus here is (almost exclusively) on the anthology.8 This anthology, in particular, rather than others, was the product of government intervention precisely for pedagogical purposes and provided the widest overview of Marathi literature.9 Not all transformative work was the product of official and collaborative interventions, however, and the popular performance traditions of the time too, evinced a major upheaval in their production, reception and reproduction that cannot be entirely separated from activities of the colonial state, nor from the coming of print technology. New playwrights such as Vishnu Amrut Bhave (Viṣṇu Amṛt Bhāve; 1823? –1901), transformed traditional forms such as kīrtan and yakśagāṇ through their own collaborative work, spawning an impressive array of imitators and using the new technologies available for disseminating their own work— such as the wall posters I examined in the Introduction. In sifting through these materials, I have attempted to remain alert to multiple intersecting approaches that enrich my materials. Each of

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these approaches becomes a subsidiary part of the larger framework of ‘literary commons to literary canons’. Phelan’s understanding of performance’s ontology quoted above remains topical, for example, but to understand Godbole’s Navnīt, I also consider editorial theory, especially George Bornstein’s ideas about the difference between an anthology and the bibliographic code of other printed books. A bibliographic code, according to Bornstein, corresponds to paratextual materials that locate the literary text within a time and space, as an object, and are the ‘semantic features of its material instantiations’.10 However, an anthology is different, according to Bornstein, proceeding in the opposite direction, mostly stripping a work of its bibliographic contexts.11 Two more interrelated approaches remain in the background of this chapter. The first concerns Virginia Jackson’s notion of how the editorial process creates the lyric, and simultaneously the poet, and secondly, the idea, developed in the wake of Foucault, that an author (or poet, in our case) is a function of ownership and control that arises in parallel with print culture and print capitalism.12 If epics texts are so widespread in Indian literatures and performance traditions—as indeed they are—then, in this chapter, I suggest that anthologies and attempts to collate and standardise the vast epic tradition, as demonstrated in the Navnīt, are attempts to create a literary canon out of what appears, a least initially, to be a literary commons. Speaking historically, Marx reminds us of how significant the enclosure of common lands was for the birth of capitalism in England.13 Through individual acts of violence first, and then later parliamentary intervention, enclosing the commons dispossessed people and transformed them into landless labourers, forcing them into a cash economy. Using Marx’s model loosely and metaphorically, I tentatively suggest an analogue to this situation in the literary-cultural world, especially with regards to the pervasive epic traditions in South Asia. Editing and publication, in the hands of the colonial state and its agents, was, like authorship itself,14 not insignificantly entwined with the histories of capitalism and print culture. As state-sponsored practices, they similarly appropriated the broad literary-cultural ‘commons’ such as the epic traditions and indigenous knowledges to create standardised, canonical versions of epic tales. In the first section, I examine the way pandits, working closely with the colonial authorities, crafted a ‘readerly’ text, the aforementioned Navnīt. But beyond a text to be read, pandits such as Godbole were instrumental in shaping the canon of Marathi literature owing both to their selection, and also because of the possibilities of circulation enabled through print technology. What we see in these editorial (or cutcherry) practices is the instantiation of readerly activity, which

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retrospectively refashions the erstwhile pandit-kavi, performing his epic poetry, as author-poet instead of a performer. It both implicitly and selfconsciously creates the critical reader through the transfer of authority from manuscript and performance tradition to the editor of a printed text and his scholastic public. In writing this first section, I am invested, therefore, in the mechanisms producing authoritative textuality and thereafter a canon of authored texts, an activity that refocused attention onto the written page and away from the stage. In the second section, I write about Bhave’s performance as well as textual practice. Both he and his work are unique foils to Godbole and stand uncomfortably within and without the world of print media and emergent Marathi performance traditions. Bhave’s practice draws upon new print technologies of transfer and recognition, even as his productions display residues of prior poetic-performance idioms, not properly vāṅmay as discussed in the previous chapter, but more appropriately kāvya or ‘epic poetry’ written by pandit-kavis, scholarpoets, who see their work as a continuation of Sanskrit epic poetry. Bhave has long been heralded as the ‘father’ of Marathi theatre, a position that has been contested by looking at other contemporary playwrights and historically. Rarely, if at all, is he examined as continuing something pre-existing, adapting manuscript to print, along the lines I propose.15 I instead argue that Bhave’s oeuvre (both performance and published work) is a failed attempt to become the first playwright-author of Marathi drama. He utilises print technologies but to no avail: nobody remembers him as an author and few copies of his printed work remain. Finally, thirdly, I consolidate the discussion of Bhave and Godbole in a section where I discuss the interrelated topics of editing, authorship, print culture and canonicity. It was (and is) impossible to ‘author’ an epic text—impossible to control and limit discourse and demonstrate ownership over the materials that print enables through systems of mechanical reproduction.16 Editing, in this context, is significant, because it selectively adjudicates a preference for certain poetperformers (‘authors’) over others, some versions over others, stabilising which epic episodes, and the language in which they are narrated, in addition to the form. In this regard, I offer a definition of canonicity that is unique to the South Asian world, but has implications beyond it when one considers indigenous and traditional knowledges. Epic narratives circulate in the commons and are not only a temporally dense ‘simultaneous order’, as A.K. Ramanujan mentioned but also a literary space that is constantly subject to appropriation and consolidation.17 Essentially, I am interested in the possibilities offered by employing a spatial metaphor, beyond regional variations/contexts, to understand canonicity and epic materials.

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LITERARY TRANSFORMATIONS: CREATING READERS IN COLONIAL INDIA Unsurprisingly, relations between the colonial government and traditionally literate castes in India were well established by the 1850s, the former requiring assistance of the latter in various ways. One of the mainstays of this association involved the preparation of printed materials for circulation, whether pedagogical, scholarly or otherwise. Unlike Gujarati magazines funded by Parsi entrepreneurs and traders, Marathi newspapers and printed materials encountered several financial hurdles, especially with regards to patronage. The Parsis had prospered via contacts with the British as ship-builders, financiers, opium traders and other commercial agents; Marathi-speaking banker and trader families, however, experienced a decline after the Peshwa rule.18 Secondly, most literate castes who were capable of producing literary and journalistic prose ‘responded in a typically traditional fashion to the new possibilities of extended literate networks suggested by print’—that is, by finding it an act not just of manual labour but also an act that would undermine notions of authority, entrenched in ‘pre-colonial norms of intellectual exchange and modes of social contestation’.19 That is, owned and possessed by a community rather than one individual. No doubt such attitudes also bore traces of Sanskrit literary culture, in which the kaṇṭastha, ‘“in the throat”, or memorized was invariably privileged over the knowledge that is granthastha, “in a book”’.20 In such situations, printing sacred texts was especially strongly discouraged. Some orthodox brahmans even refused to touch printed texts outside of their ritual practice.21 Such an intersection of economic conditions and prevalent scholarly attitudes prevented a regular press from emerging in the new colonial milieu from the 1820s to the 1830s. As a result, ‘independent press initiatives in Marathi initially remained subordinated to the production of instructional material and school-books’ at least until the 1840s from which time onwards a ‘minuscule autonomous reading public in Marathi’ emerged.22 But with instructional materials, however, the colonial government was more than willing to lend a hand in financial matters. The Navnīt (1854) is one book that tellingly occupies a space that Bhavani Raman describes in her Document Raj (2012). ‘[I]n contrast to a number of studies that detail the collaborative nature of colonial knowledge,’ Raman instead writes about, ‘how an insatiable appetite for knowledge to aid good governance and for ensuring accountability through writing made for a range of subtle official interventions in textual practice.’23 In line with Raman’s thinking about the need to move away from debates about whether colonial rule imposed a harsh and foreign set of concepts that erased more organic forms of cultural life or whether pandits and other

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intermediaries were able to significantly shape colonial culture from their only ‘nominally subordinate’ position (as Raman describes)24, here too, I am more interested in attending to the specificities of what happens to ‘literature’ (vāṅmay as discussed in the previous chapter, and kāvya, epic poetry) when the colonial state and its cutcherry scribes applied a systematic structure of power, knowledge and technology. How do vāṅmay and kāvya become sāhitya, so to speak, or rather, how is a social and performance practice transformed into a literary artefact/object on the printed page, assembled by an editor? How are the possessions of a community of knowers being interpolated, interpreted and transformed for a different kind of reception, in which the intended audience may not be from the same community? These subtle interventions included the canon of Marathi literature too, conceived in this nexus of colonial and (upper) caste power, through the ambidextrous applications of state (and colonial) capital and the knowledge of various pandits who had gradually found themselves in official positions that enabled them authoritatively to conjure the broader outlines of a canon. The Navnīt, edited and published in 1854 under the guidance of Parshuram Ballal Godbole (1799–1874), was one of the most influential instructional texts published in the Marathi language. Even as the logic of caste and privilege leant a certain uneasiness to the material and technical aspects of publication, such pandits were nevertheless at the forefront of many educational activities from the 1820s onwards, first notably in assembling a Marathi dictionary as is evident in prefaces to the dictionary.25 These assisting pandits shaped both anthologies and dictionaries with the limitations and exclusions of their own knowledge. But the pandits who edited and printed the Navnīt, in the service of the colonial state, were perhaps unaware of the consequences of their actions. They excluded most śāhīrs, for example, and only admitted a few bhakti poets—Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar, Namdev. It comes as no surprise that the bulk of the Navnīt contains Marathi kāvya—composed by persons similar to Godbole himself—other learned pandits. For many decades, Godbole, the editor of the Navnīt, was employed as the pandit to the official Marathi translator, Thomas Candy (1804– 1877), and played a considerable role assembling the aforementioned Marathi dictionary. By the time of Godbole’s passing, the Navnīt had been reissued in nine editions and was the primary text used for Marathilanguage instruction, after basic grammar, whether for colonial officials or Indians. It was then reissued as a ‘revised, edited and enlarged’ edition in 1882.26 As a publication of the Education department, with significant financial backing, the text circulated widely and enjoyed large print runs dwarfing those of newer literatures. For example, the 1882 front matter mentions that it had a print run of 4,000 copies

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while the 1895 and 1910 editions (the only other colonial-era editions that I possess) mention print runs of 10,000 copies each—the 1910 edition was the sixth ‘new’ edition since 1882. The text has been almost continuously in print to this present day and may be, perhaps, the most re-printed text in Marathi literature, most recently in 2015. Beyond these numbers, the editions after 1882 offer a unique perspective on the editorial process—especially observations about creating ‘readers’, and perhaps also by extension, creating ‘authors’; their justifications for inclusion or exclusion in the prefaces are also worth examining as are the tables of contents between editions. The most notable editorial decisions (between the first editions and the ‘new’ editions, around 1880) transformed the book and its constituent poetry from a kind of manuscript and performance guide into a ‘readerly’ text. For example, Figure 2.1 is an image of a copy of Moropant’s (1729–1794) Marathi manuscript version of the ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode from the Mahabharat.

Figure 2.1: A manuscript copy of the beginning of Moropant’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode from the Mahabharat (1828). The top arrow points to the prefatory material that frames the episode within the context of the Mahabharat, while the arrow below is the actual beginning of the episode Courtesy: Anandashram Samstha.

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I’ve chosen this episode from Moropant’s oeuvre for four reasons: I speak about Moropant a little more in the fourth chapter, because the ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode is an important parable that is often taught in Sanskrit classes, and thirdly, its many renditions constitute a sort of tradition of their own, lending it popular appeal, much like the epic text itself.27 More importantly, it is included in the several editions of the Navnīt that I possess. Inclusion in all editions of the Navnīt further demonstrates its significance as an episode for more popular instruction and enables us to see how the text changes as the Navnīt is refined for readers. Finally, if selection is a process of interpretation, then we must also trust Godbole’s selection here: this episode is an important one for its frame narrative, which similarly portrays a king, who, like Yudhiṣṭhira, has a penchant for gambling. The date on the manuscript in Figure 2.1 marks it as 1751 of the śaka calendar or 1829 ce, making it a copy of Moropant’s own work. In the manuscript (which measures 10 cm × 30 cm), one observes the economy of writing, with large amounts of text carefully, tightly and neatly packed into the centre. There are no spaces between words, which are themselves set off by small, faint vertical lines. Yellow seems to be correctional ink and the two underlines are still a mystery I am trying to solve. In successive editions, the Navnīt (1854, 1873, 1882, 1895) transformed the poetry from something primarily oral, privileging the voice (despite its written form), into something relatively more stable, dead and to be apprehended with a far more limited sensory apparatus: sight, reading, internal cognition. That is, if kāvya was a written form whose reception was through performance, then creating this as a stable text for a reader is already a departure from kāvya as such, from kāvya to sāhitya. This is discernable through the experience of reading and evident on every page of the printed versions. For example, we can observe the bibliographic code in flux and being formalised to aid the reader. But creating a reader was a learning process for the editors. It took three forms. Firstly, earlier editions (such as the first 1854 and 1873 editions) demonstrate a biographical preface in flux, with a full headnote for the 1854 version, but only the birth and death in the 1873 edition, in addition to a list of his most important works (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3).

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Figures 2.2 and 2.3. First is the 1854 Navnīt’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode and below, the 1873 edition’s headnote and introduction to Moropant.

There is no headnote to the work itself, so the reader would have no idea where this story is taken from, nor why it may be significant.

Figure 2.2: Moropant’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode, the ‘Nalopākhyān’ from the Navnīt (1854) Courtesy: Mumbai Marathi Grantha Sangrahalay, Sandarbh Vibhag, Dadar.

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Very basic headnote for Moropant that indicates year of birth and death according to a śaka calendar as well as a Gregorian, and it also includes a list of other important works. Finally, there are no spaces between words, showing that the editor hasn’t broken the sandhī, or convention of retrogressive assimilation adopted from Sanskrit.

Figure 2.3: Headnote and introduction to Moropant, Navnīt (1873)

Later editions add the headnote back in, placing the poet within a tradition of other poets, thus establishing relationships between poets—canons too, can be defined as relationships between writers. Later editions (1882 onwards) also prefaced many poetic compositions with a summary of sorts, so that the reader may know at what point in the narrative s/he is entering, as in the case of epic poetry, for example (see Figure 2.4). Secondly, and most importantly, while earlier editions remain as close to the manuscript as possible, later editions break up sandhī (the grammatical convention of retrogressive assimilation, adopted from Sanskrit), and also add spaces between words (Figures 2.3 and 2.4).

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Here, the editor lets the reader know (1) exactly where this episode is narrated, in the Vanaparva of the Mahabharat. (2) He also skips much of the prefatory material in the episode that was part of the 1854 edition as well as the manuscript, and starts directly with the main part of the story, with Naḷa mentioned in the first line. (3) Finally, he provides footnotes for vocabulary and usage.

Figure 2.4: Moropant’s ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode, the ‘Nalopākhyān’ from the Navnīt (1882)

(Ironically, the first edition was lithographed. It is easier to read than a few of the later editions because lithography cannot be carved so economically onto a stone without losing legibility on the printed page. Type, however, can be made more economical on the printed page.) Far from a mundane point, spacing out words and breaking up the sandhī not only makes the written words easy on the eyes but it also singularly transforms the performative experience of the manuscript into a readerly experience for two reasons. For starters, one doesn’t need to pronounce words while reading the text and therefore doesn’t need to hear the words to know when they begin and end. As a result, the experiential qualities of the manuscript, as something that pervades one’s body through the sounds of recitation, aurality and other elocutionary qualities are lost when one reads the printed word in silence, especially after the editorial decisions. It becomes something with more narrowly, and almost exclusively, visual qualities. Secondly, as a consequence, it also departs from the traditional appearance of manuscripts, recomposed vertically with line breaks and ‘swimming in a little gel pack of white space’ as Nicholson Baker writes in

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the epigraph above. By departing from the on-the-page-appearance of a manuscript, the text itself became something no longer beholden to the performer’s interpretive and performative authority.28 The locus of authority shifts away from the performer as an interpreter of a story, with the performance as an authoritative interpretation of that story, to an editor who may be unaware or uninterested in the performative qualities of the language or even the performance. Performers, unlike texts, have constantly to reinforce their authority through repeated performances, and that authority remains bound to the performance; it cannot be generated in other ways.29 (I suspect, however, given that even playwrights such as Kirloskar, whom I speak about in the following chapter, began their careers as kīrtankārs Godbole must also have been aware of standard practices of recitation and elocution, and may have assumed that his readers would be too.) By contrast, printed texts enable authorial control to be exerted from afar as well as through legal technologies of capitalism and the state. Even worse, the pandit editors could be ideologically motivated to excise purportedly incorrect forms, colloquial vocabularies and the like from the printed versions altogether—and they often did so consciously and reflectively, as was the case with Krishnashastri Chiplunkar (Kṛṣṇaśāstrī Cipaḷuṇkara, 1824–1878; see also the previous chapter): A Marathi grammar ought to include all its different varieties. But grammars of no language represent all its different forms; instead the language, especially the written form used by those who have authority over others due to knowledge, power and prestige is the variety that grammars describe.30

Distinctions between orality and grapheme, mapped onto the performance and text-manuscript, are also epiphenomena of the social practices of language during the time. Speaking about the oral literacy and graphic literacy, Prachi Deshpande writes, ‘phonology (the study of sounds in a particular language) and orthography (the appropriate sequence of graphemes, or written signs) were distinct domains in premodern Marathi literate culture’.31 Once the stigma of manual labour had grown less significant and these domains were brought closer together, it seems that editing came to occupy somewhat of the same position of performing: an authoritative showing. Editing was a process endemic to a transition between manuscript and print culture since it ensured that the circulating text would remain (relatively) stable. It wrested the power of interpretation away from the re-copier, the performer and away from elocutionary acts, thus transforming notions of authority in the process. ‘[T]his material

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shift from manuscript to print culture gradually produced a new culture of reading founded on the idea of a visually complete, or more accurate written text’,32 which contained an ample amount of jagged white space around the text. Later editions (such as shown in Figure 2.4) even contain explanatory footnotes and a glossary for difficult words. Thus, in isolating individual words, the text became complete, unhinged from externalities of enunciation and spoken-performative practices. But visually complete does not mean that it signified in a way that would resonate with its history and contexts of its original reception. Editorial theory, as I mentioned above, views the anthology as a special case of a printed book. Unlike other printed materials, which provide their bibliographic code, anthologies often provide only the barest of contextualisations—usually only the dates. Instead, anthologies transform texts into museum pieces to be read differently from their original contexts of reception. With reference to English poetry, Bornstein notes, Such reduction serves to emphasize the chief remaining aspect, the aesthetic, for which the main use of the date seems to be to allow its insertion into an ongoing story of the development of English poetry. In that respect, an anthology does for poems what an art museum does for art objects: it removes them from a social or political setting—whether a church, a palace, a town hall, or whatever—and inserts them into a decontextualized realm which emphasizes the aesthetic and the stylistic. In this material sense, the ‘ideology of the anthology’ means not a selection of poems representing certain points of view, but rather the anthology itself as a dehistoricizing field that obscures the social embedding of its own contents.33

With regards to pandit-kavis in particular, the decontextualisation could hardly be clearer—especially a spatial one. No longer part of an evening kīrtan adjacent to a temple space, nor part of a pilgrimage, in the case of the included wārkarī poets, the poetry contained therein loses at least some of its political and religious salience. Similar to Bornstein’s understanding in which the commercialisation of anthologies, such as the Norton Anthology go hand-in-hand with the poetry’s aestheticisation in our case, the colonialbureaucratic imperatives initiate such a transformation, making the remnants of performance into an aesthetic object that can be displayed alongside other texts within an ongoing story about the development of a Marathi poetic canon. The reader must sit with a text that s/he would likely only have heard and recited in the original contexts—and this fact is true even over a century later. How many Marathi speakers read ārtīs?

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Or read Nāmdev or Tukārām? Or decide they should read a kīrtan? Canonicity then becomes an act of appropriating from various spatial, ritual and temporal contexts, and then reducing them onto a page. Finally (and thirdly), these editorial decisions transformed the pedagogical process—an externality dependent upon the quality of instructors. Firstly, memorisation in classrooms, recitation and reading aloud may be considered as continuing a kind of performance based upon the texts contained within Navnīt.34 But to compare that with what the pandit-kavis were doing would create a false parallel between the reception of kīrtan in a temple space, to be seen and heard, along with a kind of religious exegesis and the classroom. It may have been the case that students did memorise and recite the poetry from memory— indeed a kind of performative pedagogy. But as decontextualised practices, not part of a ritually or calendrically significant public event, and further reliant on reading the Navnīt, it would be difficult to equate memorisation of this kind with the performances of kīrtan. Secondly, the editors of the 1882 edition specifically mention their desire to omit works that are overly philosophical (vedāntika, adhyātmika), implicating and deploying a rationale concomitant with secular reading practices. Mostly, the editors understand that students have difficulty teaching themselves, nor are teachers always qualified enough to teach students. While many wrote to complain about such omissions, the editors mention that the director of education had also requested it, deferring responsibility and also demonstrating the way traditional knowledge and colonial power intersected and coalesced when convenient: Godbole disavowed responsibility for the omission.35 Dnyaneshwar (1275–1296) is one ‘poet’ whose inclusion in the Navnīt was inconsistent. Included in the 1873 edition, Godbole’s successor Ravji Shastri Godbole (his relative?) omits Dnyaneshwar in the 1882 edition but reinserts him back into the 1895 edition. Presumably, the Godboles attempted to inculcate secular reading practices—in line with English instruction. Importantly, the anthology transformed the educational experience from one with others into one where a student or reader could read by him/herself, even if the student may have used the text within a classroom. That is, the Navnīt implicitly and inadvertently created a more or less private reader, isolated from others while sitting with a text, and so unable to raise questions or gain context that are not already given within the bibliographic code. The editor, therefore, had to supply enough materials to satisfy a private, self-sufficient reader whose contact with the greater world of intelligentsia may not be so frequent or sustained. Thus, as a process of reception, its ‘look’, experiential process and ideological underpinnings deftly brought hitherto performative practices (with manuscripts in the background) into the print world and began

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the process of transforming them into literature-as-reading with a purportedly self-sufficient, isolated reader. In reverse too, the editor and his activity created the object of the reader’s attention, the poem, as something to be read rather than heard, seen or performed.36 Ultimately, these gradual changes demonstrate the editors’ awareness of changes in literary reception. In some cases—such as K. Chiplunkar’s statement above—that savvy awareness percolated through history as if an agential one through which literate castes shaped and exercised their power. In other cases, such as with the omission of vedāntika and adhyātmika works, their interventions seem less agential and more bureaucratic fiat. Done out of necessity to remain within the bounds of state power, limited or enabled by the logic of whatever their education policy director asks of them. Regardless of their agency, the editorial and print processes correspond to an inflection (in the mathematical sense) from one curved space of performance, audience, publicness, recitation, orality (manuscript and kāvya) among others into a more closeted, limited space of reading, textuality, privateness, in which state power and social hierarchy penetrate through the background machinery of the book as material artefact and exchangeable commodity, unchecked as in the presence of social others.

LITERARY AUTHORITIES AND PERFORMANCE? Vishnu Amrit Bhave (d. 1901) published his own Nāṭya-kavitā-saṃgraha (NKS hereafter), literally ‘play-poem collection’ in 1885, towards the end of an illustrious career that stretched back nearly four decades.

Figure 2.5: Picture of Vishnudas Bhave taken from V.G. Bhave’s Vishnudas Caritra (date unknown)

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During my archival research, it was common to hear of how ‘crude’ Bhave’s plays were, once again disturbing easy notions of authorship and authority, foundational figures and literary developmental arcs. Such comments projected the past as something that wants refinement. The conversations led me to believe that Bhave was doing something that was qualitatively not up to par, but since then, Marathi theatre has come a long way. Bhave remains a perplexing person for other reasons as well—and is occasionally even a topic of some debate in the lofty world of Marathi newspaper theatre criticism.37 Bhave’s NKS is remarkable in light of the few reviews of Bhave’s performances that yet remain, especially when compared with the kinds of poetry found in the Navnīt. It is a concise rearticulation of its multiple inheritances from epic poetry, the bhāgvat and yakśagāṇ (literally ‘Song of the Yakśas’ or song of semi-divine beings) tradition.38 I begin with a brief overview of how Bhave came to his commercial moment at the Grant Road Theatre in Bombay in 1853. Then, I examine some of the reviews of his performances in relation to the ‘play scripts’ that he published in the NKS. Bhave’s NKS also contains many of the same stories seen in Selections from the Marathi Poets and demonstrates how textually modelled theories of authorship and originality cannot be sustained in these scenarios. Following this, I finally examine Bhave’s troupe dynamics from its humble beginnings in the early 1840s into one with many imitators and contractual obligations. These dynamics explode the notion of an author, one seemingly at odds with his actors, thus once again speaking to both the freeness of composition and play within this tradition, but also to the tension between textual authority, the performers and performance. Vishnu Amrut Bhave, the father of Marathi itinerant theatre and the progenitor of the Marāṭhi Saṅgīt Nāṭak or Marathi Music Drama, died in 1901. But his beginnings are relatively unclear—and indeed unremarkable if considering commonly held accounts. Perhaps, this is why there are few detailed accounts of his life and career,39 which remain largely overshadowed by the ‘golden era’ of the Marāṭhi Saṅgīt Nāṭak (approximately defined from 1880 to 1920). Bhave was a third-generation court pandit in the town of Sangli in present-day Maharashtra.40 And in some ways, his trajectory mirrors that of Parshuram Pant Godbole. The one a cutcherry-scribe-turned editor, the other a court-panditturned-performer in Sangli. Sangli was the seat of Chintamanrao Patwardhan (d. 1851), a particularly wealthy landlord, who had been a sticky and intransigent aristocrat since the early days of the East India Company rule. The wealthiest of the Patwardhan families, he owned lands that brought him a total of upward 20 lakhs (2 million) rupees per annum in the 1810s. Patwardhan was also known to have a refined

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taste in keeping with his disposable income, perhaps the very reason he was deemed so ‘capricious’ by the British—a label often ascribed to aristocrats with aesthetic sensibilities (see following chapter).41 His substantial wealth had brought artists to Sangli, from sculptors to handicrafts women, and of course, it cultivated Bhave too.42 In 1842, Chintamanrao had the chance to see a troupe from presentday northern Karnataka—most likely a bhāgvata troupe—that was touring through his domains.43 He knew of Bhave’s frequent literary and artistic endeavours, and Patwardhan, a man of means, asked Bhave to stage something similar to what he had seen. Bhave writes, ‘Even though my age was only 18/19 at the time, with a firm determination and the encouragement of Patwardhan, I began my work.’ Presumably, this was one of Bhave’s first real ‘jobs’. Remarkably, he even admits, with a sense of disappointment, that finding people who knew how to read was difficult—once again recalling Prachi Deshpande’s comments above on differences between ‘oral literacy’ and ‘graphic literacy’. He expresses difficulty in doing his work, given that few people read or wrote, whether in moḍī or the bālbodh (modified devanāgarī) scripts.44 Graphic literacy was something of a problem from the very beginning of his theatrical endeavour and played a constitutive role in shaping Bhave’s practice—both as performance and the NKS. But rather than a natural inclination, Bhave mentions that Patwardhan’s invitation served as an instigation to begin his studies, reading from the Purāṇas and other materials that came to hand. His efforts did not stop with reading, however. Beyond reading and writing, he also had to learn and understand the Purāṇas, assemble a troupe and compose some music for the play. He gives very few details about these processes. For the music and verse, he consulted many servants of hari (haridās) and others like them, such as kīrtankārs, but found a lot of their verse and music dissatisfying and so composed his own verse on the matter that was appropriately endowed with śṛṇgār, vīra, karūṇa and other rasas.45 The first production of Saṅgīt Svayaṃvar46 (Sita’s Choice) based upon the marriage of Sītā to Rāma in the Ramayan was staged at the court to a very limited audience.47 It took place in 1843, much to Patwardhan’s delight and to the consternation of other court pandits, who may have been jealous of Bhave’s rising through the ranks, as Bhave imputes. Taking a costume (veś gheṇeṁ) was highly inappropriate, according to the court pandits—but they were placated by one śāstrī, Gopinath Shastri Agashe.48 Having pleased the Patwardhan, Bhave composed approximately ten other plays from the Ramayan, whose titles enable us to glean their content, and which seem unsurprisingly similar to the content contained in Godbole’s Navnīt. In lieu of his services, Patwardhan offered him a reward—a land grant of

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his own.49 Unfortunately, Patwardhan passed away in 1851 before such rewards could be finalised and Bhave had to find his own way since the Patwardhan heir had neither artistic inclinations nor a desire to honour his predecessor’s purported land grant. Having left court, Bhave had to arrange for many things on his own. An intimate courtly setting was a comfortable place to inaugurate a career in theatre. Living quarters to stay, dressing rooms, ample money for costume and set design, and most importantly, an audience that maintained composure during the performance or at least was a willing participant—all these were luxuries provided by a wealthy, aristocratic patron. Circumstances were significantly different after leaving. From the time Bhave left the court of Chintamanrao Patwardhan in 1851, his activities were forced to become commercial ventures, depending upon a more modern kind of patronage, contingent upon securing funding and selling tickets. Upon departing the court, Bhave had to arrange, negotiate for and find all the things that were provided for him while he was in Sangli. He had to find appropriate venues, recruit the talent to perform and procure materials and sponsorship for set and costume design. Using his connections, he then travelled to Pune, where he befriended people such as Krishnashastri Chiplunkar, the pandit on the educational committee and father to Vishushastri, both of whom I spoke about in the previous chapter. K. Chiplunkar had published widely in Marathi and was closely associated with the colonial educational circles and the Marathi intelligentsia—Godbole, for example, was one of his associates. After conducting a few trial runs in Pune, K. Chiplunkar then introduced him to other persons of standing in Bombay. In Bombay, persons such as Dr Bhau Daji Lad, an eminent physician and Sanskritist and Jagannath Shankerseth, a wealthy merchant industrialist and others assisted him to find a venue for his shows.50 Bhave first staged his play Sītā Svayaṃvar on 14 February 1853 at a private residence, simply to generate some kind of press for his play.51 He then staged it again one month later on 9 March 1853 at the Grant Road Theatre, Bombay’s pre-eminent theatre of the time, normally reserved for travelling companies from Europe.52 The English-language press devoted lengthy reviews with full plot summaries of these early shows: it hadn’t yet grown weary of Marathi drama. The following partial reviews are available in S.N. Banhatti’s now-classic work on Marathi theatre but can also be found online. An anonymous reviewer provides the plot for the performance on 9 March: The play commences with the appearance of a recitor and a clown (an imitation of the old Greek chorus), and the recitor, having described to the clown all the particulars regarding the play, Gunputtee and

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100 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Sarasvatee; ‘the God and Goddess of Wisdom’ appear. They are soon followed by two angels, who by their performances [sic] endeavor to please the deities. The play commences with a battle between Luxuman, ‘the Brother of Rama’ and Indrajit the ‘son of Ravan, the giant King of Ceylon’ in which the latter being killed, his head is carried off to Rama by his monkey followers, while the arm of Indrajit, cut off by an arrow from Luxuman, flies through the air to the apartment of ‘Sulochana,’ the wife of Indrajit. The dead limb writes for the information of the lady of the sad fate of her husband, Sulochana resolves to burn herself on the funeral pyre of her husband and goes, with her father-in-law Ravan’s permission, to Ramchandra for the recovery of her husband’s head. The monkeys around, to put her virtue to the test, request Sulochana to make the dead head smile. The head smiles and it is restored to her. A great many events that followed are omitted, and the next part of the play commences with the accession of Rama to the throne of Ayodhya after exile of Sita, his wife, to a forest on account of certain imputations cast upon her conduct. In this forest Sita was taken care of by the venerable sage Walmika, the poet who wrote the Ramayan and in whose house she was delivered of sons, afterwards named Lahu and Kusha. They were instructed in the science of war by this sage. Ramchandra having resolved to perform Ashwamedha or Horse sacrifice, the horse ‘Shamkarna’ was sent all over the world with a large force to enforce homage from all the princes of India. The horse on his way came to the place where the two Royal Children had been hunting and was caught by them. The brothers of Rama who were successively sent to rescue the animal, were defeated and Ramachandra himself came to the battle field and was also vanquished. The little children having carried off from Rama’s body some of his ornaments to their mother Sita, she recognised them as her husband’s and praying the assistance of the sage Walmika, he by the power of the Mantras (charms) resuscitated Rama, his brothers and followers, and the relationship between the children and Rama having been discovered, they are united in bonds of love and returned together with Sita in joy to Ayodhya the capital of Rama.53

Two days later, the following review appeared: The Hindoo Play, recently announced in our columns, duly came off on Wednesday night in the Grant Road Theatre. We regretted to see the house so thinly attended, and are surprized [sic] that the Hindoo gentry do not extend their patronage more freely to their national drama. Several European gentlemen were present, but no ladies. The

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performance seemed to us very creditable, as far as we could judge— utterly ignorant as we were of the language used, which was Mahratta. The actors were all Hindoos—those of them who performed the chorus being Brahmins in their ordinary dress, and the others—the real actors—the representatives of Gods, Goddesses, demi-Gods and Monkey Soldiers being Khutrees. The clown was a leading character throughout the play, and thought nothing of standing on his head, or making a summersett [sic] while Rama or Ramchundra or Indrajit were delivering heroic orations. The God and Goddess of wisdom seemed quite at home, too, while sitting on chairs and couches, and the combat between Luxuman and Indrajit was carried on (the weapons being bows and combatants dancing fiercely round and round each other) in an English looking parlour. These things we mention, however, with no wish to detract from the merit of the performance, which was such, upon the whole, as agreeably to disappoint us [sic]. The grotesque feats of the clown amused even those who did not know even a word of what he was saying, and his jests and repartees were received with hearty laughter and loudly applauded by the native portion of the audience, [sic] The actor who represented Ramchundra bore himself with part and dignity becoming such a hero, and the two boys who performed the female characters, moved, spoke and lamented after the most approved fashion of eastern women. The various costumes were doubtless quite as appropriate as could be assigned to the representatives of such extraordinary dramatis personae as the God Gunputtee, the Goddess Sarasvattee, and the monkey deity Hanooman. Scenery and the other similar accessories that so much aid the effect of a dramatic representation, were, however, as we have already noticed, entirely over-looked; and we recommend more attention being paid to these matters for the future. In other respects the performance was really admirable; and gave us a much higher idea than we previously possessed of the capabilities of Hindoo Actors. We hope the Company will meet with the success which they well deserve. To all, whether European or Native, who possess a knowledge of the Mahratta language, these Hindoo plays must be highly entertaining; and there was nothing to be seen in the performance of Wednesday night that could be objected to by the most fastidious.54

Such reviews constitute a lucky few tidbits of information, of any kind, about Bhave’s theatrical events. Later, I focus on the textualities of Bhave’s play text, but first, it is important to highlight the many noteworthy phrases and observations from the reviews above. For starters, we find an obvious investiture in the best possible colonially sanctioned discourses

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of condescension and noblesse-oblige: they ‘gave us a much higher idea than we previously possessed of the capabilities of Hindoo Actors’ or ‘the most approved fashion of eastern women’ for example—language that resonates with the letters between Kirloskar and Hewett that I discuss in greater depth in the following chapter, as with Kielhorn’s comments about renowned rishis (sg. ṛśi; see previous and following chapter for more about Kielhorn). But there are more pressing and prescient moments here too— heroic orations, clowning, not to mention women who make bodiless, fleshy, busts smile; talk of brahmans and Khutrees, Rama’s defeat, death and revival. The reviewer also describes knowing and unknowing audiences, the former impressing upon the latter; the recitor and clown too, as the sūtradhār and vidūṣak, receive colourful treatment (including the requisite and partially orientalist comparison of Indian with ancient Greek performance). Significantly, despite the comparison with ancient Greece, the reviewer recognises the novelty of Bhave’s productions in a section not contained in Banhatti’s book but present in the review from The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. The reviewer writes that the drama conforms to romantic, rather than classical unities and patterns (one thinks of Kunṭe from the previous chapter), which have a systematically differently dramaturgy than the classical unities of space and time.55 That is, they are expressive in a romantic mould, and these dramas are not business as usual for Marathi performance traditions. The reviewer also notes the quasi-religious tenor of the drama too, which is off set by the incongruity of the ‘English looking parlour’. Finally, he recognises the episodic nature of these performances—mentioning that ‘a great many events that followed are omitted’—before describing the next part of the performance. Thus, we too are reminded of the way prefaces to episodes in the Navnīt also situate the reader, given that few (if any) ever start at the beginning and end at the end, as well as the wall posters I described in the introduction. Finally, to return to the description, there are two shorter episodes—Indrajīt’s Defeat (Indrajīt vadh) in the battle between Lakṣmaṇ and Indrajīt, and Sulocanā’s Departure (Sulocanā sahagaman) (Figure 2.6)—and a final more complex, bipartite episode taken from concluding sections of the Ramayan generally known as the uttararāmacarītam or Rāma’s Later History, though Bhave lists these descriptively as Aśvamedh yadñya and Lavakuśā’khyān (the Horse Sacrifice and Lives of Lava and Kuśa).56 These episodes constitute a totalising emotional experience for the viewers with a holistic view of society encapsulated in its many elements: there is a masculine narrative for men, a feminine one for women, a narrative of unknowing patricide for children, in which the children are shown to gloriously supersede the father; a narrative of ritual importance and another about

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families reuniting. Each is presented through varying layers of heroism, sacrifice, love, filial piety and touches of humour, albeit grotesque, within and without the action. The entire production is framed with an introductory sequence that stands outside the action of the drama: of worship and meta-theatrical commentary between the vidūṣak and sūtradhār. That is, far from a purely secular drama, the structure and frame established an alternate ontological reality through ritual practice. If we are to follow these tropes to their logical conclusion, then the drama itself is world-making by definition: enactments of ritual are, by design, efficacious in the world. In a previous article, I used archival images to show the introductory sequence described in the review and often also invoked in scholarship that foregrounds the framing of the play to be re-enacted (or ‘restored’ to use Schechner’s words) during the performance.57 A critic writes: First and foremost, the Sūtradhār will offer an invocation [maṅgalācaraṇ], after coming out of the curtains and standing to the side. He will offer some verses in song praising Gaṇeś. Then, in the guise of a forest-dweller, the Vidūṣak will come out [of the curtains]. After he dances in a foolish manner, the Sūtradhār and Vidūṣak will have a humorous discussion. After a common introduction, the Sūtradhār will tell which play will be performed…. Then, after a praise/puja of Gaṇpati, the curtain will open [for the audience].58

Figure 2.6: ‘Indrajīt vadh and Sulocanā sahagaman’ from Bhave’s Nāṭya Kavitā Saṅgraha

After the curtain opens, Sarasvati would enter on her peacock and another song praising her would ensue followed by the introduction of the play that the vidūṣak and sūtradhār have decided upon. All spoken dialogue, including the songs of praise, with the exception of the vidūṣak’s jibes, is thus far the sūtradhār responsibility. But after this, we have little sense of any real ‘scripting’ or dramaturgy

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to guide the central action in the performance and descriptions of the ‘heroic’ orations leave the reader wanting for specifics. Unfortunately, placed against the actual play texts Bhave provides in his NKS, one finds only a paginated dearth that is textuality, devoid of even the savoury and unsavoury details animating the review. It is textuality that on its own could easily be mistaken for an authored textuality in the limiting, Foucauldian sense of that term.59 The play text narrowly focuses on only one aspect of the performance—the sūtradhār’s (narrator’s/recitor’s) narration—to the omission of almost every other aspect. A glance at Bhave’s NKS, Figure 2.6, confirms this fact.60 I have chosen not to translate this page, partially to demonstrate its likeness to the pages above from the Navnīt, especially from the earlier editions, but partially also because it contains simply a narrative for the sūtradhār to recite. The page lists the title of the play: Indrajīt vadh āṇī Sulocanā sahagaman (The Defeat of Indrajit and Sulochana’s Departure). But below that, the text departs from expectations. Rather than the purportedly ‘normal’ front matter listing characters in order of their appearance and relation to each other, we find instead a secondary headline that mentions ‘Pad Rāg Jogī Tāl Dhumāḷī’ or ‘Song Rāg Jogī, Beat Dhumāḷī’. These two, rāg and tāl, correspond to a harmonic scale and the accompanying mṛdaṅga drummer’s beat cycle. What follows is a verse for the sūtradhār to sing in the Rāg Jogī and with the accompaniment of a mṛdaṅga (drum) and jhāṅj (cymbals) in a way typical of kīrtan and also povāḍā.61 The first two verses elaborately narrate the events of the ongoing war, attentive to various twists and details, from Ravana’s initial successes to Rama’s solutions that cause the army of monkeys to advance to Lanka, causing Indrajīt to retreat. And, characteristic of the entire text here and elsewhere in Bhave’s NKS, only the sūtradhār speaks—and renders other character’s speech too. Sulocanā does not speak, at least not here, even though her story was apparently a popular one, sung specifically by women in many Marathi households.62 But Bhave’s text, at least, leaves it out.63 This, too, reminds us of Bhave’s difficulties in finding literate persons for his troupe, but also of the reviews above. Where, then, are the heroic orations and circumabulatory sparring, so memorably described in the newspaper accounts? Managing a theatre troupe was, then, as now, a multi-polar world, with authority distributed amongst the many egos involved in various elements of the production. The driest and legal exemplars of this centrifugal structure are the contracts Bhave asked his troupe members to sign. On official stamp paper, these contracts attest to both Bhave’s frustrated attempts to impose some form of discipline onto his troupe members, but also to how members themselves capably negotiated their roles, once drama

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(is this even drama?—performance) became popular in the western Deccan, especially in urban and semi-urban centres. It is in such a setting within the troupe performing decidedly non-dramatic texts that we see a form of ownership that exceeds that of the sole author as a singular agent, in which troupe members negotiate and provide vitalising and often contradictory energies (somersaults and heroic orations in juxtaposition, for example), in spite of contractual obligations. Both V.S. Desai’s edited collection of documents about Marathi drama, as well as Banhatti’s 1957 work contain letters and a contract from Vishnu Amrut Bhave’s ‘Sangli Drama Troupe’, as it came to be known. Once Bhave began to take his troupe on tour, the theatre became quite popular and commercially viable. Various people founded dozens of other troupes—up to 36 according to Sudhanva Deshpande.64 Facing what proved to be a competitive environment, Bhave found it necessary to enter into contracts with his actors to prevent them from leaving to join other troupes among other things.65 The contract contained in Desai’s collection is for a period of 10 years and is signed by the actors in exchange for singing tuitions— Bhave apparently taught them how to sing for his many plays, though none of those moments are included in the NKS, even though he published it at the end of his career. The contract is written on stamp paper, making it official and legally binding. The contract contains some other noteworthy terms: the first item, for example, demands that actors take parts they are assigned and go where Bhave takes them without complaint. Item 4 states explicitly, ‘We will not deceive you as we did when we previously went to Mumbai and we shall not teach others as you have taught us without your permission.’ Obviously, there was some internal friction in the past—especially in Bombay. Meanwhile, the last paragraph mentions that the penalty for breaking the terms of the contract will be 100 rupees in addition to an eighth part of the monies earned from teaching the materials elsewhere.66 Without a doubt, such contracts indicate that there must have been fierce competition among troupes seeking an audience and also that managers such as Bhave had to negotiate quite a bit with unruly actors who may not have been too pleased with the roles they were given. Furthermore, since the plays themselves were not original productions or works of a single author, and the general narratives were well known to their audiences, anything beyond the ordinary, anything innovative would give one troupe the upper hand. It would make the troupe known within the performing circuit and must have been a valuable commodity. Surely trained singers provided one such advantage. The contract also suggests a nascent culture of stardom, in which actors renowned for a particular skill found themselves in a position

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to negotiate and draw audiences to performances. Appaji Kulkarni (1903), speaking of actors renowned for their swordsmanship, says that good swordsmanship was a particularly demonic characteristic and ‘even Europeans would purposefully go to see the plays’. He then lists several actors from various troupes who were well known for their talent.67 Similarly, Naregal notes, ‘Gopal Date’s rendering of Sumersingh, a complex character in Nārāyaṇrao Peśwe Yaṅce Nāṭak [A Play about Narayana Rao Peshwa] established his reputation as a star actor’.68 The Altekar Troupe even advertises Gopal Date in its own performance of none other than Lavakuśā’khyāna (the same episode performed by Bhave) at the Elphinstone Theatre in Mumbai, saying that the play will be doubly colourful [duppaṭ raṅga] owing to his acting.69 We may surmise that the Altekar Troupe, owing to Gopal Date, performed a unique version of the story, perhaps even a version that became authoritative owing to the actor’s abilities. Figure 2.7 depicts the actor with the paraphernalia that established his reputation: a sword and a shield. Unlike the photograph of Bhave (Figure 2.5 above), who poses as a Rembrandt-esque patriarch in retirement nearing the end of his career, Gopal Date’s photo has a different aesthetic. The photo positions Date at an angle, without a full-frontal gaze, in a manner that was typical of the emergence of a kind of secular photography, evading any kind of overt religiosity to the gaze, but nonetheless implicated in a politics of the gaze.70 Within the frame, we see something of his caste background commingled with its splendour. He is dressed lavishly in a shiny, rich vest that includes a stole draped from his left shoulder to right waist. He wears a cream undershirt, and much like traditions of painting or photography elsewhere in the world during the time, white and lighter-coloured fabrics are indicative of wealth— they are difficult to maintain Figure 2.7: Gopal Date as Sumersingh cleanly. He also sports a turban, a thick beard and Courtesy: Author, 2010.

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wears several pearl necklaces, one of which even contains a slightly obscured pendant, just below the stole’s diagonal. And there are even some indications of earrings. The stole also implicates him within a colonial paradigm of chivalric honours—much like the Maharaja of Kolhapur in the following chapter (see Figure 3.4). Overall, he sits with an air of authority, resting his palms on his knees, with elbows bent just slightly to accentuate his overall shape, some kind of stable and indelicate polyhedron. His posture has almost perfect symmetry, with the exception of his gaze, turned towards the camera. To add to this, his weapon of choice is laid casually sheathed across his lap, along with a shield. In his downtime, he enjoys some kind of drink, brought to him no doubt by a servant, which rests on a decorative tray. Such embellishments—clothes, jewellery, drink, arms, headdress, indicate his status as a warrior of standing, perhaps one who fights as passionately as he relaxes, is refined and commands a presence to be reckoned with in both activities. But, and against such a heroic portrait, Bhave’s contract suggests that managers of companies were trying to rein in the power actors had within their troupes so as to establish some proprietary rights over the acting and singing procedure, and guarantee returns in terms of patronage and invitations to perform. Managers (such as Bhave) wouldn’t have wanted such actors to depart for other troupes. Binding contracts ensured actors did not take audiences to other troupes’ performances when and if they left one troupe. All this, for ten years, as in Bhave’s case—a long commitment! Part of finding something for everyone in the production was the result of the production process, in which it was difficult for any one person to exercise total artistic and authorial control over the many elements of the performance.71 What interests me further is how a night’s performance was ‘assembled’ through the internal logic of a troupe, to produce such an interrupted, piecemeal, and multifarious emotional journey, as I described in the introduction. The reference to a ‘chorus’ in the reviewer’s description above is a convenient place to begin since the dynamics of the way music was produced mimic those of producing the play itself. Itinerant troupes also depended upon a regular fare of songs that were often stolen from other troupes or composed by members of the troupe. With many of the itinerant troupes, however, ‘composing’ music meant something different from what we mean by the word today, even though Bhave himself was a sophisticated composer.72 Musically speaking, the appeal lay in the ability of managers and actors to compose catchy tunes that would stimulate the audience and patrons. This required a great deal of cooperation between performers and the writers. For example, until the golden era of Marathi music drama,

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there was no music director for the plays. The first play to require a music director was Saṅgīt Mānapmān (Honor and Insult, the Musical; 1911), by K.P. Khadilkar—and Urmila Bhirdikar explains why: This was the first time the author and music composer of a play were separated. Unlike earlier writers of Kirloskar Sangit Natak Mandali, the writer of Manapaman—Krishnaji Prabhakar Khadilkar (1872– 1948)—was not familiar with the musical moulds. The practice of actors suggesting tunes did not work as well. So, Govindrao Tembe (1881–1955), who had by then acquired a reputation for playing the harmonium, as well as being a knowledgeable and keen scholar of music, was invited to suggest tunes. In the first joint attempt, Tembe sang the tune of a thumri, ‘meri gali a jav re sawariyan’ [come embrace me, my love], popularized by a gramophone record. Khadilkar, after understanding the distribution of the long and short vowels, wrote out the song ‘vari gariba vira ji abala’ [outwardly poor, hero looks effeminate]. After this, he assured Tembe he felt confident of writing songs on the tunes Tembe suggested.73

Thus, actors and musicians suggested tunes they knew to the ‘playwrights’, who then composed the lyrics based upon those tunes. Composing a play seems to have been a similarly cooperative endeavour. It is more appropriate to say that these plays were ‘assembled’ collaboratively, rather than ‘written’ by a single author or composer. Just as Bhave’s play Sita’s Choice was based upon the marriage of Sita, from an episode in the Ramayan, most plays staged by travelling theatre troupes were plays that were adapted from popular religious traditions well as from the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. All the stories that would have been performed were known from numerous religious festivals and practices, from a particular region—western India broadly— in this case. Glancing at the plays Kulkarni lists as being performed, we need only to read their titles to glean their content—content that overlaps with so many of the poets from the Navnīt and Bhave’s NKS.74 All the plays in the list derive from sources that were part of a living performance or religious tradition during the time and were played in the vernacular. Those partaking in the performance would not have to memorise lines since the stories themselves were not the original works of a playwright-author who carefully guarded their circulation through print and legal channels, but rather part of a cultural repertoire, part of known narratives, being recited or performed in a variety of ways during various festivals, some of which may have been centred around particular stories too. Owing to these historical conditions, I suggest that the traditional boundary between playwright-author, actor and

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spectator was particularly porous. Sudhanva Deshpande’s comment on this point is particularly salient: ‘Modern theatre in Maharashtra radically altered the relationship between the actor and the audience; it now entailed new ways of representing, new ways of looking [as] . . . the audience, from being participants, became spectators or onlookers.’75 That is, modern theatre constricted the potential of interaction between audiences, playwrights and the performers. If I may go a step further, perhaps we may understand this transformation—this inflection—as a noticeable departure from theatre as a communicative space towards something more playwright-author-centric. But the theatre described above, Bhave’s kind, wasn’t the ‘modern’ theatre to which Deshpande refers and for the better part of the 19th century, authorship remained an elusive and impossible ideal. What else are we to make of critical interventions such as Many Ramayanas and Questioning Ramayanas?76 And it was precisely the enacted stories from epic and hagiographic narratives that resist notions of authorial authority. On such occasions, at such performative events, the performer/audience divide too was somewhat blurry, with a ‘knowing’ audience that attended the theatre not for an unknown plot but rather for how the known plot unfolds through the quality of song and representation—gestures, costume, movement, recognisable actions. While actors and the audience may not have been literate, they certainly were aware of religious narratives and of the iconography associated with various gods, goddesses, and heroic figures (see, for example, the ‘many-headed Ravana’ I have spoken about elsewhere).77 As such, the locus of power lay not in the printed work—rarely, if ever, received as such, but rather in the sensibility of performers and playwrights to chorale audiences into rapture and ebullition rather than a more private sentiment felt only in isolation while reading or within a darkened theatre hall. We have to think of this kind of performance as a negotiation between the manager, actors and the spectators. The actor’s ability to ‘realize’ his roles based upon practice and experience was very valuable to the troupe and also expected by the audience. If the actor portrayed his character well, it would be consistent with the broad cultural repertoire of known representations and meet audience expectations, while also offering some individual flair, as with Gopal Date above. The manager (and writer-but-not-author in Bhave’s case) astutely negotiated contracts, reining the power of actors to completely overwhelm the drama into a pure star vehicle, or worse, use the training given as a path to another troupe that may have offered more money. But crucially, in cases when the story, fable, the narrative is well known—hardly unique to India—the audience played a vital role through their active and often rowdy participation. In this respect, performers came to the audiences

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on their turf, so to speak, attempting to reimagine narratives the audience already knew, and whose representations audiences already had pre-formed in their mind. Nobody ever hears the epics for the first time, a popular idiom in South Asia.

ENCLOSING THE COMMONS I have, throughout this chapter, emphasised technologies that enabled persons within the Marathi intelligentsia to refashion the world of epic performances. Some of these were legal technologies such as the contract, whereby a manager/director could own forms of training and representation and prevent his actors from profiteering from them without his consent. Such actions laid claim to various traditional knowledges, interpretations and their staging, in ways that were unprecedented in the ecology of Indian performance and literature: whereas caste would have played a role in the ownership of traditional performance knowledges, here we see something quite different, even though most of my historical actors are brahmans. That is, it is not about containing the knowledge within a given (brahman) caste community. Instead, in transferring and translating that kind of possession into a legal framework, for an individual such as Bhave, its implications go beyond caste. One imagines the relevance of these processes to, for example, multinational corporations attempting to legally own formulas from āyurveda or Bikram Choudhary’s attempts to copyright his yoga sequence. More historically speaking and contemporary to my sources, the centurylong effort by the upper castes to create Hindustani music as a tradition dominated by brahman practitioners has been well documented.78 Such studies use sociological, culturalist and ideological approaches—I have attempted to use a different lens, shifting focus to the materiality, broadly, of how the performing arts in India were gradually appropriated into a capitalist system through the enclosure and appropriation of common, albeit group-specific, knowledges—epic literature in the case above. But these processes are not limited to South Asia, nor are they purely historical, but linger in our contemporary world. I offer an example from the US. Nobody can deny that 20th-century American popular music would be sorely impoverished without the farreaching impact of early–mid-20th-century Black musicians, especially persons such as Robert Johnson or Big Momma Thornton, who died in relative obscurity. Meanwhile, white musicians who were influenced by or adapted their work became well known: how many versions are there of ‘Cross Roads’ by Johnson, how many of us think of Thornton (rather

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than Elvis) when we hear ‘Hound Dog’? When we think of appropriation, globally, from a disadvantaged community by a community with more relative power in society, I believe what we witness is akin to laying claim on knowledges that are not fully capitalised—not owned by individuals but rather by groups of individuals whose relationships with one another function in ways antithetical to capitalist modes of ownership, production and reproduction. In this sense, these knowledges are ‘within the commons’ and successive attempts to appropriate, standardise and capitalise mark a departure from alternative contexts of ownership towards a more individual and capitalist one. Godbole’s Navnīt demonstrates a similar process, at least in editions dating from the 19th century. He too exercised a great degree of control over Marathi textualities in two ways. Firstly, from epic texts, he selected the right episodes to include from a much vaster tradition. He also purged those epic episodes of their idiosyncratic elements by standardising their lexicon, grammar and re-arranging their appearance onto a printed page. He eventually added footnotes to ensure that the literary artefact remains comprehensible. In Godbole’s lifetime and the decades after, during the period of this study, the bulk of the Navnīt contains compositions by pandit-kavis on epic themes, often the same episodes from different pandit-kavis, but we aren’t told why these are unique. Why are there no folk versions of the epics, for example? Secondly, in collating (the few) materials of bhakti poets—Nāmdev, Eknāth and Tukārām—his activity attempted to shift the locus of control away from communities who may be invested in the continuance—away from the respective vārkarī saint maṭhs and pālkhis. There are almost no śāhīrs, save Rām Jośī (1762–1812), and in later editions, Anant Phandi (1744–1819). These activities created the larger outlines of the Marathi literary canon. Canons, however, are not so straightforward, and defining a canon or statements about what constitutes a canon, are legion. Some approaches simply believe that canons are ‘the best of what is known and thought in the world’, an approach that forgets that canons are, after all, carefully constructed and assembled.79 Other approaches tend to look at literary relationships between past writers and contemporary ones—canonical writers are often cited, reworked and the source of inspiration for later writers, whether as part of a tradition, through anxiety that needs to be overcome or a colonial legacy that needs to be explored and then re/ unmade.80 In the former case, T.S. Eliot’s essay places a great emphasis on the contemporary writer in relation to the past—but he, like Matthew Arnold before him, omits consideration of why some authors emerge as canonical while others do not. For example, in Eliot’s own time, William Blake had only just been recovered by William Butler Yeats and

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is nowhere mentioned in Chiplunkar’s essays (see the previous chapter), which consider the works of the other five canonical Romantic poets— Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. In the latter case, of colonial legacies being overcome, Mukherjee, while attentive to notions of colonialism, power and education, suggests that performances of Shakespeare in India contribute, ‘to the counter discourse of postcolonial modernity, one that reflects neither a vindictive remembering nor a forcible erasure of the historical conditions of its emergence’.81 I find this disingenuous—much like most of the discourse of Shakespeare in India. Shakespeare in India is a market tactic that forces content on Indian traditions so that they gain currency. It enables the continuation of a dubious patrimony through neocolonial systems of domination that ‘uncouple power from responsibility’ (as another Mukherjee reminds us)82—unless, of course, it undoes that work through the specific undoing of secular language, as I have shown elsewhere.83 But there are other ways to look at canon formation: Richard Ohmann’s and Kenneth Warren’s works are particularly topical for thinking through the South Asian situation. Ohmann describes the literary scene in the US and the class dimensions of authors, publishers and consumers—essentially all from the same socio-economic class; Warren, meanwhile, suggests that African-American literature as a tradition owes to the 1986 Plessy vs. Fergusson US Supreme court case that created ‘separate but equal’ (in theory) facilities for Black and white Americans.84 For Warren, once such statues were overturned, one cannot think of ‘African-American’ literature as such. Both Ohmann and Warren are germane here: the former for his consideration of class; the latter for his attention to the law. With regards to Godbole, one is reminded of Veena Naregal’s comment about the public sphere in India: that brahman dominance within the late 19th-century world of Marathi print was so pronounced, they effectively excluded all other castes—and thus also reproduced the narratives of their caste and class background. They did this through the consequential power assemblage of literacy, caste, colonial power and print technology. But they also used legal means as Bhave attempted with his theatre troupe. Essentially, all materials that were outside the purview of Marathi brahmans became non-canonical sources for recovery and rediscovery at a later date. The official version, consolidated through the assemblage of colonial and caste power was, therefore, a clear demarcation of a literary territory, a canon constituted through a take-over of the commons, enabled by the distributive powers of mechanical reproduction. The individual artist, poet, writer, playwright, etc. was central to this new mode of production, even though the stage itself was not an

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authored one, owing to the dynamics of power between actors, real audiences (as opposed to the imaginary public of the work or text) and manager-playwrights, especially for epic texts. It seems even more difficult to say exactly where the centre of authority rested, and where one was able to provide a definitive or authoritative interpretation of the given story. It’s not that the reader emerged at the precise end of the author’s existence, but rather that the reader never can emerge in the same specific way Barthes mentions. Thinking about the stage this way is something akin to Sandria Freitag’s analysis of the interrelatedness of reading, print and oral culture, in which visual and aural/oral literacy remain important to the acceptance of theatre, its enjoyment and spread.85 The colonial and postcolonial predicament for literary studies in India is, therefore, one in which flat textualities only hint towards authoritative performances. Editorial practices consolidated a canon from a larger field of persons who became poets through editorial choices. But none of these necessarily became occasions for reading, even though that is precisely what the Navnīt sought to do. Rather than a Barthesian authorial death concomitant with at readerly birth, western India saw the creation of a literary canon through print which became a space to forget performance.

NOTES  1 Divya Cherian, ‘The Many Padmavatis’, The Hindu, 17 November 2017, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-many-padmavatis/ article20492672.ece, accessed 19 June 2019.   2 Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007).   3 Truschke, Audrey, ‘Silencing Sita’, The Caravan (blog), 31 May 2018, http:// www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/sita-ramayana-many-voicesoutrage, accessed 19 June 2018; ‘Maharashtra: Ban on Naming Liquor Shops after Deities, Historical Figures’, India News, The Indian Express, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/maharashtra-ban-on-namingliquor-shops-after-deities-historical-figures-4945472/, accessed 11 May 2021.  4 Beyond Sreenivasan, cited above, a few quick examples that are representative of the field of Ramayan studies: Paula Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (University of California Press, 1991); Paula Richman, ed., Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition (Berkeley [u.a.]: University of California Press, 2001); Paula Richman, ed., Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Deven M. Patel, Text to Tradition: The Naisadhiyacarita and Literary Community in South Asia (Columbia University Press, 2014); Paula Richman and

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114 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Rustom Bharucha, eds., Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, 2021.   5 Satyamurti explicitly mentions why she includes such episodes that are not part of the Pune critical edition: they are ‘widely loved’. See Mahabharata: A Modern Retelling (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2015), 31.   6 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 146–149.   7 Paul Ricoeur’s understanding in ‘What is a Text?’ is topical here:

Whereas dialogue is an exchange of questions and answers, there is no exchange of this sort between writer and his reader; the writer does not answer the reader. Rather, the book introduces a shift between the act of writing and the act of reading, between which two acts there is not communication: the reader is absent from the writing of the book, the writer is absent from its reading.



See Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 107. In these situations, we must think of the performance as exchange. For more on language and grammars, a good place to begin is with Prachi Deshpande, ‘Shuddhalekhan: Orthography, Community and the Marathi Public Sphere’, Economic and Political Weekly 51, no. 6 (6 February 2016): 72–82. So, for example, Tukārām gāthā (1867) the collected works of the saintpoet Tukaram (1598?/1608?–1649/50), is the anthology of a singular poet’s complete works. Or, Ravji Shastri Godhalekar’s Sarva Saṁgraha, vol. 2 (1897), which self-identifies its topic as the poetry of ‘bhagvadbhakt satpuruṣañcī bhakti dñyān’ or the ‘knowledge of bhakti of holy men who are devotees of Gods’, indicating an overtly religious tenor and motivation, unlike the Navnīt’s more secular, educational framework, as I write below. See Ravji Shastri Gondhalekar, Sarva Saṁgraha, vol. 2 (Pune: Jagaddhitecchu Chapakhana, 1897), prasthavana. George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6. Bornstein, 13. Virginia Walker Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton University Press, 2005); Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes and Ernest Mandel, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1 (1990), 877–895. Stephen Orgel, ‘What Is a Text?’ in Staging the Renaissance, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 2012), 83–87. Orgel also raises a number of questions that I do in this chapter when referring to renaissance drama. A good overview of these can be found in Makarand Sathe’s work. He revisits old scholarship that juggles three ‘firsts’ in Marathi theatre. See Makarand

  8

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10 11 12 13 14

15

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Sathe, A Socio-Political History of Marathi Theatre: Thirty Nights, trans. Irawati Karnik and Shanta Gokhale (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015). 16 Foucault and Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 108, 118–119. 17 As cited in Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen, 8. 18 Veena Naregal, ‘Vernacular Culture and Political Formation in Western India’, in Print Areas: Book History in India, ed. Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta (Bangalore: Permanent Black, 2004), 151. 19 Naregal, 150, 152. 20 Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 82. 21 Anant Kakba Priolkar and J.H. da Cunha Rivara, The Printing Press in India: Its Beginnings and Early Development. Being a Quatercentenary Commemoration Study ... and an Historical Essay on the Konkani Language (Bombay: Marathi Samshodhan Mandal, 1958), 128–129. 22 Naregal, ‘Vernacular Culture and Political Formation in Western India’, 151. 23 Bhavani Raman, Document Raj Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8. 24 Raman, 7. 25 Naregal, ‘Vernacular Culture and Political Formation in Western India’, 149. 26 It was issued in 1854, 1857, 1860, 1862, 1864, 1868, 1871, 1873 and 1878. See preface to 1878 edition in Paraśurāmapanta Tātyā Goḍabole and Rāvajī Śāstrī Goḍabole, Navanīta, or, Selections from Marathi Poets, originally compiled by Paraśurāmapanta Tātyā Goḍabole; revised, enlarged and improved from the edition of 1878 (Bombay: Nirṇaya-sāgara Press/ Government Central Book Depot, 1882), 1. 27 Patel, Text to Tradition. 28 Narayana Rao mentions that performance and manuscript culture are intimately connected, and while the performance may indeed be authoritative, it is authoritative only on the basis of a manuscript, without which it is merely ‘oral story’. As cited in Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 315. 29 Christian Novetzke, ‘Divining an Author: The Idea of Authorship in an Indian Religious Tradition’, History of Religions 42, no. 3 (1 February 2003): 20–38. 30 As cited in Deshpande, ‘Shuddhalekhan’, 76. 31 Deshpande, 73. 32 Ibid., 74. 33 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 13–14. 34 Prachi Deshpande, ‘Recitation in Schools’, 27 September 2021. Deshpande raised this question in response to a talk I gave on this chapter at the International Conference on Maharashtra 2021. 35 Goḍabole and Goḍabole, Navanīta, or, Selections from Marathi Poets, originally compiled by Paraśurāmapanta Tātyā Goḍabole; revised, enlarged and improved from the edition of 1878, 1, 2, 6. 36 This point has been made in reference to the works of American poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), and her poetry. Notably, however, the

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116 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Navnīt predates the redefinition of Dickinson’s work as poetry by half a century. See Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery. 37 ‘शेक्सपियर आणि शोकांतिका’, Loksatta (blog), 14 June 2018, https://www. loksatta.com/agralekh-news/william-shakespeare-2-1696765/. The article mentions that by contrast to Shakespeare, who lived four years before the birth of Shivaji, Marathi theatre is a very young tradition, and mentions Kirloskar (see following chapter) and Vishnudas Bhave as the earliest Marathi playwrights. See also Ashutosh Potdar’s response to it, suggesting that there was an earlier playwright than Kirloskar and Vishnudas Bhave, namely Serfoji: ‘Ashutosh Potdar - ।। सरफोजी राजे, नाट्यसंमेलन, रं गभूमीचा जन्म...।।...’, https://www.facebook.com/permalink. php?story_fbid=10156514967038221&id=705788220, accessed 26 June 2018. I have already mentioned there are other potential ‘firsts’ but my problem with this line of reasoning is that it excludes performance in favour of ‘theatre’, just as arguing for literature often excludes forms that are more inflected through differing means of reception than reading, as I explain below and at various moments throughout this book. 38 Shrinivas Banhatti, Marāṭhi Raṅgabhūmīcā Itihāsa (Puṇeṃ: Vhīnasa Prakāśana, 1957), 22–24; Martha Bush Ashton, Yakṣagāna: A Dance Drama of India (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977). 39 Shanta Gokhale, Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), 1–11; Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 83–87; Veena Naregal, ‘Performance, Caste, Aesthetics’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 44, no. 1–2 (1 June 2010): 80n.1; Kumud Mehta, English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century: A Thesis Submitted to the University of Bombay for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts (Bombay, 1960), 128. 40 Vishnu Amrut Bhave, Natya Kavita Samgraha (Pune: Shri Shivaji Chhapkhana, 1885), 5. 41 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change in Western India: 1817–1830 (London: New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1961), 52. See also the next chapter for ideas about aristocratic degeneracy. 42 Dattātraya Baḷavanta Pārasanīsa, The Sangli State. (Bombay: Lakshmi Art Printing Works, 1917), 62–63. 43 Banhatti, Marāṭhi Raṅgabhūmīcā Itihāsa, 18; Appaji Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi (Puṇẽ: ‘Āryabhūṣaṇa’ Chāpākhānyānta, 1903), 8. 44 Bhave, Natya Kavita Samgraha, 5. 45 Bhave, 6. 46 Literally, svayaṁvar means ‘self-husband’, and the term refers to the tradition of princesses choosing their own husbands in classical India. More often than not, the term refers to Sītā’s choice of Rāma. In other cases, the name of the bride precedes the term so as to differentiate the event from Sītā’s choice. Saṅgīt means ‘music’. So, the title can be translated, in this context, as ‘Sita’s Choice, a Musical’.

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47 Nissar Allana’s Painted Sceneries contains a photograph of the venue at Chintamanrao Patwardhan’s courtyard where Sītā Swayaṁvar would have been performed, and it demonstrates the intimate nature of the performance space—a central courtyard in a kind of large house called a ‘wādā’. See Nissar Allana, Painted Sceneries: Backdrops of the 19th Century Marathi Sangeet Natak (New Delhi: Theatre and Television Associates, 2008), 15. 48 Bhave, Natya Kavita Samgraha, 6. Even the term for prostitute (see below) was and still is veśyā—a woman who has taken on a constume. 49 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi, 12. Bhave also writes about this in his introduction. See Bhave, Natya Kavita Samgraha, 6–8. 50 Banhatti, Marāṭhi Raṅgabhūmīcā Itihāsa, 102–103. 51 Some of the following paragraphs were previously published in Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘The Popular Itinerant Theatre of Maharashtra, 1843–1880’, Asian Theatre Journal 32, no. 1 (June 2015): 190–227. 52 Banhatti, Marāṭhi Raṅgabhūmīcā Itihāsa, 96–97. 53 Banhatti, 394–395. I wasn’t able to find this review in the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. 54 Banhatti, 396–397; ‘Hindoo Dramatic Performance’, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (1838–1859), 11 March 1853. 55 ‘Editorial Article 4 – No Title’, The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce (1838–1859), 16 February 1853, 316. 56 I translate ākhyān as ‘life’ using a slightly dated sense of the genre. Novetzke defines ākhyān as the ‘famous part’ because ‘in it the kir-tankar retells well-known stories and invokes illustrious personalities’. See Novetzke, ‘Divining an Author’, 225. In classical Sanskrit, sometimes commentators distinguished between kathā as a fictitious genre and ākhyāyikā as an autobiographical genre reserved for stories born from ‘actual’ experience. I suspect that the status of heroic figures, especially drawn from epic sources, had something of a truth value to them that made them qualify as ākhyān/ākhyāyikā and even though general knowledge holds ākhyān to emerge as a genre during the 17th century (see Anna C. Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 27), there’s always more to research. I also suspect we may relate this even to Jack Goody’s ideas that all societies have genres that tell fact from fiction: these epics are accorded an ontological truth. See Sushil Kumar De, ‘The Akhyayika and the Katha in Classical Sanskrit’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 3, no. 3 (1924): 507–517. See also Jack Goody, ‘From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling’, in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3–36. 57 Kulkarni, ‘The Popular Itinerant Theatre of Maharashtra, 1843–1880,’ 196– 197. 58 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi, 13. 59 Foucault and Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 117–120. 60 Bhave, Natya Kavita Samgraha, 96–105, 131–144. 61 Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation, 34.

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118 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 62 Harry Arbuthnot Ackworth, ed., Ballads of the Marathas: Rendered into English Verse from the Marathi Originals (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1894), 114, https://archive.org/details/balladsofmaratha00acwo, accessed 8 December 2017. 63 In the fifth chapter, I speak about how the feminine voice was incorporated into Marathi drama in the latter half of the 19th century. Ananta Kavi, a student of Ramdas (1608–1681), wrote Sulocanākhyān and another story about Sulocanā in approximately 1721–1722. Both are in Sulocanā’s own voice. See Anantakavi, The Poems of Anantakavi: A Popular Marathi Poet of the Maharashtra, ed. Vāmana Dājī Oka, vol. 17, Kavyasangraha (Bombay: Nirṇaya-sāgara Press, 1896), 14–25, 121–168. 64 Sudhanva Deshpande, ‘Excluding the Petty and the Grotesque: Depicting Women in the Early Twentieth Century Marathi Theatre’, in Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power, ed. Lata Singh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 181. 65 Mehta, English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century, 130; Vasant Shantaram Desai, ed., Vishrabdha Sharada, vol. 2 (Mumbai: H.V. Bhate Prakashan, 1975), 9–10; Deshpande, ‘Excluding the Petty and the Grotesque: Depicting Women in the Early Twentieth Century Marathi Theatre’, 177. 66 Desai, Vishrabdha Sharada, 2:9–10. 67 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi, 30. 68 Naregal, ‘Performance, Caste, Aesthetics’, 91. 69 Banhatti, Marāṭhi Raṅgabhūmīcā Itihāsa, 423. The play was staged on 9 August 1877. Unfortunately, Banhatti does not provide the poster itself, only the transcription of the poster that advertises Dāte’s swordsmanship. 70 See Christopher Pinney for more about colonial photography, especially his discussion of Ganesha: ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (New Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18. 71 I find some parallel here between the way this theatre was produced and the way Prasad speaks about popular Hindi cinema. See Prasad’s chapter on heterogeneous forms of manufacture, esp. M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42–45. 72 Urmila Bhirdikar, ‘The Heroine’s Song in the Marathi Theatre between 1910 and 1920: It’s Code and Its Public’, in Play-House of Power: Theatre in Colonial India, ed. Lata Singh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 30–31. 73 Bhirdikar, 38. 74 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi, 27. 75 Deshpande, ‘Excluding the Petty and the Grotesque: Depicting Women in the Early Twentieth Century Marathi Theatre’, 181. 76 Richman, Many Ramayanas; Richman, Questioning Ramayanas; Richman, Ramayana Stories in Modern South India. 77 Kulkarni, ‘The Popular Itinerant Theatre of Maharashtra, 1843–1880,’ 203.

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78 See, for example, Bakhle, Two Men and Music; Deshpande, ‘Excluding the Petty and the Grotesque: Depicting Women in the Early Twentieth Century Marathi Theatre’; Naregal, ‘Performance, Caste, Aesthetics’. 79 Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018), 684–702. 80 T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018), 885–890; Harold Bloom, ‘The Anxiety of Influence’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018), 1574–1582; Ankhi Mukherjee, What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015). 81 Mukherjee, What Is a Classic? 185. 82 Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan/Arts & Humanities Research Council, 2010), 6. 83 Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘Performers: From “Courtesans” to Kathakali King Lear’, in Encounters with Emotions: Negotiating Cultural Differences since Early Modernity, ed. Benno Gammerl, Philipp Nielsen and Margrit Pernau (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2019). 84 Richard Ohmann, ‘The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960–1975’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al., 2018, 1686–1701; Kenneth W. Warren, ‘Does African-American Literature Exist?’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018), 2488–2493. 85 Sandria Freitag, ‘Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus between Creation, Consumption, and Participation in the Public Sphere’, in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, ed. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 38–39.

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3 A FOUNDATIONAL MELODRAMA FOR INDIA: SHAKUNTALA AND SURROGATION Few texts succinctly and demonstrably capture the mood of an entire era as the Abhijñānaśākuntalam or The Recognition of Śakuntalā (Śakuntalā hereafter). For the late 19th century, its author Kālidāsa (300–400 ce?) was almost without parallel in the imagination of Indians, comparable only with a certain English bard who wrote at the cusp of the colonial enterprise, in which he also partook. And yet, both Kālidāsa and Shakespeare were brought into a likeness under the yoke of colonialism in South Asia, the latter to teach Indians a purportedly ‘secular’ literature and the former as a case to relive and revive former grandeur. But Kālidāsa was significant in Europe too, as inspiration for Romantic movements from the late 18th century onwards. The importance of William Jones’ publication and circulation of Asiatic Researches from 1784 onwards, acknowledged as one significant node of this Oriental culture economy, has been widely discussed and recently revisited.1 Indeed, the colonies were particularly significant sites of exchange, interaction, imagination and exploitation. They provided revitalising, innovative, and more often than not, foundational energies for several academic disciplines beyond literature, notably anthropology and linguistics, as I also mentioned in the first chapter.2 Literatures from the Orient found their way to Europe, exported with all the colonial baggage of representativeness; as raw materials essential for emerging academic disciplines. Within literary studies, texts such as Kālidāsa’s drama Śakuntalā or other texts such as Alf Layla wa-Layla, the Thousand and One Nights (trans. Antoine Galland 1704–1705) became synecdoches for entire literatures and their respective cultures. After William Jones dispatched Śakuntalā to Europe in 1789, the text circulated extensively and was repeatedly translated and performed throughout the continent.3 Major artistic personalities also found inspiration from the play or directly adapted the drama during the 19th century. Beyond Goethe, Heine and Herder, an entire coterie of European intellectuals participated in the Oriental culture economy; Śakuntalā was one of its main foci.4 Rather than trace the play’s many valences outside of India, however, this chapter historicises Śakuntalā’s reception, circulation and 123

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popularisation in 19th-century western India seeking to describe the play’s function within a colonial setting and the subtle recognition of a bygone social past which it temporarily manifested and resuscitated. That is, how did a world literature text circulate and function within its colonial setting? Below, I historicise its transformation from a text that was academically significant, was performed within university confines by students for an audience of students, their Orientalist and other university teachers, and indulging officials of various stripes into a drama with popular, political and historical import. Balvant Pandurang Kirloskar (Balvant Paṇḍuraṅg ‘Aṇṇāsāheb’ Kirloskar 1843–1885; Kirloskar hereafter) translated Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā early in 1880 into Marathi as Saṅgīt Śākuntal (1880), A Musical about Śakuntalā. As a result of its translation, the play circulated with great popularity: without a doubt, the 1880s are the only time in modern Indian history when the play was popularly performed, rather than revived academically.5 As such, Śakuntalā needs consideration not as an ideological text and vehicle for elite nationalist discourses, frequently spoken about but rarely ever staged, nor simply as a text that inspired European romanticisms on the back of the Oriental culture economy. Instead, it was intimately pertinent within its social world.6 Performances of Kirloskar’s translation of the play operated within an affective economy that allowed the drama’s sentimentality to permeate and be felt in society, especially as a balm for dysfunctional social relations.7 The affective economy in which Śakuntalā operated trafficked in melodramatic themes, and the play functioned as a surrogate, a performative solution to various kinds of social erosion, a process I explain in three stages. In the first (brief) section, I describe Śakuntalā’s re-importation into India via Orientalist discourse and its insertion into the newly established colonial Indian academy (its popularity within a precolonial system of schooling is unknown since that system is rarely discussed in scholarship, but Sanskrit commentaries on Kālidāsa suggest that his works were canonical before romantic, colonial and Orientalist thought). As an academic drama staged primarily by students within the confines of an emerging university system, the play and its performances rarely circulated. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, a set of historical factors contributed to the play’s resurgence in the bourgeois and popular imagination—these factors concerned Indian Maharajas, their territories in India and female performers, some of which I spoke about in the previous chapters.8 In the second section, I foreground these historical factors to make them topical for Śakuntalā’s success as a play. These socio-historical factors created a situation in which the feeling of social disintegration was the norm. Within its socio-cultural contexts, Śakuntalā’s melodrama functioned as a surrogate, creating the

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facade of an integrated society. The play’s vision and its performances fill gaps within a social order, thereby operating as substitutes to actual lost social relations.9 In section three, I describe the travels and responses to Kirloskar’s production of Śakuntalā and how he managed to move the play out of university confines into the public eye. Within the public eye, the play was melodrama par excellence, emerging precisely when social relations were disintegrating. Its repeated performances, the Kirloskar company’s extensive travels to locations in British and Princely India, as well as the way theatre troupes sought and befriended patrons, sutured these social ties at an allegorical level and brought the Indian rajas and the ‘brahmanical’—the princely and the priestly—into an unstable, performative union.

(FROM INDIA TO EUROPE) … AND BACK TO INDIA Working with pandits in Calcutta such as Radhakant, William Jones eked out a translation of Śakuntalā into English in 1789.10 He followed a pattern that remained typical of various colonial personalities and officials well into the late 19th century: having a coterie of munshis and pandits at their service in order to understand, interpret and translate various Indian language texts.11 It was a unique accomplishment, notes Dorothy Figueira, because it was the first Sanskrit text to be translated directly from the original Sanskrit and Prakrit into English. While Charles Wilkins had translated the Bhagavadgītā in 1785, his translation was mediated through Persian and Wilkins had not translated a complete text. Jones’ translation was both directly from Sanskrit and it was of a complete text.12 The translation granted unfettered access, in theory, to an entirely different literary tradition. No less a personality than Victor Hugo remarked that the play and interest in Oriental research were to the 19th century what Greek literature had been for the ‘savant of the sixteenth century’.13 Śakuntalā became a synecdoche, representing an entire literature through itself. Even opponents of Oriental learning in India such as James Mill acknowledged the pastoral perfection of the play.14 Such remarks, frequently seen throughout 19th-century literature, demonstrate the intellectual contexts in which these texts circulated. Śakuntalā, an oriental text, played a significant role in the way Indian literatures were conceptualised and understood in foreign locales. However, within India, the text’s ‘reception’ and performance is at best unclear in the first decades of the 19th century. While it is true that the play was translated more than a few times in the early to mid-19th century, the text’s non-academic audience was likely very slim,

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and the prefaces to translations are not indicative of reception within India, especially given that they were also written for various European readers and audiences.15 It is more likely that students revivified the text in India through various dramatic societies that they formed in the early 1860s at colleges in Bombay and elsewhere in India.16 When students staged Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā, it was staged, significantly, with a dramaturgical structure learnt and adopted from the English drama they had read and perhaps seen via travelling theatre troupes from England.17 In western India, students staged the play in the early 1860s—under the auspices of the Kalidas Elphinstone Society (the sibling society to the Parsi Elphinstone Society), a group formed by current and former Elphinstone College students. However, as Kumudini Mehta (writing in the 1960s) points out about student performance in colonial India, ‘the newspapers gave them far more attention than was perhaps warranted. There were full-length reviews with names of the cast and usually the talents of the actors were highly commended’.18 I draw attention to these performances for two reasons. First, students circulated close to centres of colonial power, which explains why their activities were covered in the press whereas the later performances that I write about were not. Secondly, student performances were highly commended, partially at least because playing gave students a purchase into modern civilised life and conversely also enabled their foreign governors to adopt an indulgent attitude as they saw their cultural and artistic patrimony pass into Indian hands—as was also the case with an H.S. Hewett (see below). While both are relevant for student performance, they also underline an important fact: student performance was not a significant cultural force of its own, rarely influential beyond university confines despite coverage in the press.

THE CONTINGENCIES OF PERFORMANCE AND HISTORY It is hardly difficult to understand why Śakuntalā did not become popular sooner—in fact, there are precisely two reasons, historical as well as performance-related. The latter case is particularly interesting because it draws us into Indian performance traditions and popular forms that were prevalent during the time. Sanskrit drama, as such, was not an extant form in India of the time. While various theatrical traditions such as Kuttiyattam (performed in Sanskrit) and Kathakali (performed in Malayalam) are arguably associated with Sanskrit and classical dramatic conventions—the former even seen as a continuous, unbroken tradition of Sanskrit drama since the 11th century—these theatres were limited in their circulation, and the Kuttiyattam repertoire

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did not comprise the classical dramas of playwrights such as Kālidāsa. Instead, the Kuttiyattam theatre staged episodes from the epics or stories from the Purāṇas, a genre of epic and religious texts composed between the 3rd and 11th centuries ce. In performance, these plays were not the same as drama—to the extent that a playwright, whose authority shapes many aspects of the performance, composes drama. Instead, these traditions were performance-centred systems in which trained actors (in the case of Kuttiyattam, for example), only loosely relied on texts, and instead used their highly skilled improvisatory training to expand the text for hours—or days—to deepen the text and also demonstrate one’s accomplishment. In western India, further up the coast from Kerala and inland, performance was less dramatic, comprising troupes of wandering poets and balladeers. These balladeers and poets also performed epic poetry, sang historical ballads and were often accompanied by several actors. They rarely, if ever, performed a single plot for the entire performance, often telling many stories. Their performances rarely contained scripted dialogues for all actors; a narrator would tell the story as actors improvised their roles (and often their dialogues)—and I spoke about these many performances in the first two chapters of this volume. While dramatic literature may not have been part of a contemporary performance tradition, the stories upon which Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā was based—essentially epic sources—were in abundant circulation and part of the cultural imaginary. For at least two centuries before the 19th century, balladeers and other itinerant poets, dubbed pandit-kavis or scholar-poets, had translated and performed the length and breadth of the epics before audiences in western India, as well as elsewhere on the sub-continent. The poet Moropant (1729–1794), whom I speak about more in the following chapter, was known to have translated and performed the entire Mahabharat—but only piecemeal, an episode at a time. So too with the 19th century with persons such as Vishnudas Bhave (d. 1903), who is recalled as the ‘father’ of modern Marathi theatre as I discussed in the previous chapter. Bhave’s own Nāṭya-kavītā Saṃgraha, literally Play-poem Collection, consists of many such epic episodes from epic and Puranic sources.19 As far the Śakuntalā story is concerned, the hugely influential collection of Marathi poetry, Selections from the Marathi Poets (1854), compiled and published by Parshuram Pant Godbole (see previous chapter), includes two separate poems of the Śakuntalā story in Marathi. The first is by Mukteshwar (b. 1609, d. ?) and the second by the aforementioned Moropant.20 Godbole was himself a pandit-kavi and the pandit to the Marathi translator at Pune, much like Radhakant (above) was to William Jones. Such textual residues demarcate erstwhile performance traditions and attest to the

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ways in which drama or not, stories such as Śakuntalā were well known, through performance rather than dramatic form. Students and academic amateur players expressed their desire to step away from the aforementioned performance traditions in several formaltering ways. They sought to remove music from theatre productions, to change the improvisatory nature of performance traditions by using scripted dialogues and to impose a dramatic form, learnt, no doubt, during their university days.21 For many students, music and song were not desirable attributes for modern, high drama, and they thought audiences should be happy that frivolous music was expunged from the performance.22 Student drama, in India, conformed to theatre as a middle-class project but was unable to impose its normative vision onto society. Indeed, it is difficult to describe the class dimensions of Indian society during the time, with the intersections of caste and class strong, but not always coterminous, especially when it came to commercial enterprise.23 Historically speaking, Kirloskar’s translation of Śakuntalā as Saṅgīt Śākuntal or A Musical about Śakuntalā, significantly rejected the student amateur party line as far as song and music were concerned. Even though Kirloskar himself had been a student in Pune and was from a background that would have made him something akin to ‘middle-class’—he was initially a clerk in the revenue office of Belgaum— his drama was different. Despite his government employ and education, Kirloskar had, in his past, composed a collection of play-poems and also worked as a quasi-itinerant bard, performing in various cities in what is today southern Maharashtra.24 These previous activities had made him keenly aware of the formal requirements for public rather than academic performance. Music and song were formal requisites of drama, not simply embellishments that could be added or disregarded in favour of other things. Kirloskar maintained this requirement by setting all verse numbers in Śakuntalā to Hindustani music: with a specific rāg and tāl. This affected how and whom he recruited—and I examine this in relation to his next play A Musical about Subhadrā in the following chapter. Generically, the effect was somewhere between opera and a Broadway musical: its music was mostly light classical; it contained over 200 verse numbers, most of which were sung, while a few were recited. But the play also contained a large amount of dialogue that wasn’t set to music, unlike opera. Secondly, from a contextual and historical perspective, certain newsworthy items from the late 1870s and early 1880s also buffeted the popularity of A Musical about Śakuntalā—externalities that were swept into the social consciousness—and intimately brought the inner theatrical world and the external world into close communion. Firstly, the status of Indian princes (to use the diminutive British term) or

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rajas (rājās, to use the general Indian terminology) in contemporary society was a tricky one, but one eminently on the minds of emerging bourgeois subjects. While technically still independent—Indian rajas were given relative autonomy within their domains, which were vast. A simple glance at the Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 gives an idea of the large territories not part of British, but rather of ‘Princely India’.25 To govern such large territories, the British created a policy of ‘divisible sovereignty’ in which the colonial government conducted all foreign policy and warfare while the princely states were each permitted to administer justice and collect revenues within their territories.26 Such statements, however, mask the actualities of local jurisprudence and revenue collection. Since consolidating their power, the British had appointed brahman tutors to teach Indian rajas various aspects of colonial governance. So too it happened after 1818 with many of the states taken over from the Maratha confederacy.27 But the relations between tutors and the rajas were not always smooth, depending upon how the brahman tutor expropriated power to himself, away from the raja. Rosalind O’Hanlon, for example, has documented some of the reasons for friction in the state of Satara, and the balancing act between British colonial authorities, brahman tutors and the Raja.28 These problems periodically resurfaced throughout the 19th century in various ways—with one of the more publicised cases of friction between tutors and the Raja of Kolhapur covered heavily in the early 1880s, variously labelled the ‘Barve defamation case’, the ‘Barve affair’ or the ‘Kolhapur affair’.29 While the details are not particularly relevant, more generally speaking, these highly publicised skirmishes led to sentiments of social disintegration between erstwhile partners in governance—Maratha rajas and their brahman administrative staff. This second point of concern is also topical for understanding A Musical about Śakuntalā’s popular circulation related to the activities of the Indian rajas. Activities such as hunting, engaging in various kinds of live entertainments, especially with courtesans and the increasingly negative connotations of dissolution and debauchery that accompanied such leisure activities, is evident with imputations cast on the Raja of Jhansi’s conduct, for example.30 It’s a trope captured succinctly and brilliantly in Satyajit Ray’s 1977 film Shatranj ke Khilari. In an early scene, two British officials discuss Wajid Ali Shah, the Nawab of Awadh, whose penchant for poetry, dance and theatre, including transvestism, is subject to a kind of scepticism that imputes and equates such activities with a loss of manliness and moral torpor.31 Essentially, without the possibility of territorial expansion—control over foreign policy— hunting, as a peacetime corollary to warfare, became an empty symbol

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of prowess in wartimes, and keeping courtesans and/or multiple wives was an expensive proposition if children could not be provided for with newly conquered territories.32 All of these issues percolated into the reception of Śakuntalā, overtly in some cases, and as a backdrop against which we can read the play in other cases. Thus, themes such as princely power, courtesanship, marriage, progeny, sexuality and the social cohesion of brahmans and rajas, were on display as Kirloskar took his company on tour.33

THE TEXT AND ITS CONTEXTS Balvant Pandurang ‘Annasaheb’ Kirloskar (1843–1885) translated Kālidāsa’s Abhijñānaśākuntalam in late 1879 and early in 1880. Following a summary of the play, I situate its main themes within the historical discourses I mentioned above, especially with reference to relationships between troupe members (and theatre more generally) and patrons—whether Maharajas, more modest aristocrats or British officials. These fraught relationships, between many almost entirely brahman troupes and aristocratic patrons, in addition to representations of princely power, were significantly constitutive of the play’s widespread historical appeal, as was the social imaginary of performing women. We need to recuperate this historical understanding so the play loses some of its orientalist or nationalist colourings. Instead, a historical reading enables us to gauge its performative consequences on society as a melodramatic surrogate or substitute to actual social cohesion.34 First, a summary of the play. While Dushyanta, the king, hunts, his terrified prey takes shelter in a wooded ashram, and three ascetics halt Dushyanta’s pursuit: the ashram is not a violent place. Instead, they request Dushyanta’s presence to observe and visit the ashram, which enjoys his royal patronage and protection and is currently being tended by the eponymous Shakuntala, the adopted daughter of the chief rishi. Dushyanta continues into the ashram slowly in order to leave its residents undisturbed. Soon after, he hears voices just beyond some trees, and spies three maidens tending to the hermitage’s gardens, one of whom is Shakuntala. After gazing at the three, he eventually approaches and courts Shakuntala, and the two are married by mutual consent and through their sexual union. Soon thereafter, Dushyanta returns to the city in order to govern, leaving Shakuntala with only his royal ring as a token of their marriage. Still enamoured with her husband, Shakuntala neglects the care of a guest, who happens to be a particularly unforgiving and curmudgeonly rishi. The rishi curses her that Dushyanta will not remember their marriage

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without the ring as a token. In act four, Shakuntala’s adoptive father, Kanva, performs the necessary marriage rites (with Dushyanta in absentia), and a retinue sets out from the ashram to the palace.

Figure 3.1: Kanva blesses Shakuntala before she departs the hermitage Courtesy: © British Library Board Shelfmark 2/2(22).

Figure 3.1 depicts Shakuntala taking her leave of the hermitage. Kanva blesses her as she pays her obeisance; her two female friends attend to her with baskets of freshly picked flowers from the gardens—much as they had been sighted in Act 1 when Dushyanta first saw them. Shakuntala’s adopted mother, or simply another elderly ascetic, strangely cowers in the background. This scene of departure was generally held by 19th-century viewers to be the most emotionally moving scene in the entire play. Even Jones’ other prompter, a pandit named Radhakant, mentioned, ‘The ring of Sacontala [sic], in which the fourth act, and four stanzas of that act, are eminently brilliant, displays all the rich exuberance of Calidasa’s [sic] genius.’35 This view was also shared in the Marathi reviews, presumably recognised as such from one of the play’s many Sanskrit commentaries.

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In act five, when Shakuntala arrives in Hastinapur at Dushyanta’s court, he has no recollection of the union; as fate would have it, Shakuntala has lost the ring and the rishi’s curse is in full effect. After a heated exchange, both the hermitage retinue and the king dismiss Shakuntala and cast imputations on her behaviour, intentions and honesty. Spurned by both, she walks to the nearest riverbank, calling on the earth to save her, where she vanishes and is transported to heaven since her mother is a heavenly nymph. In act six, we find out that a fisherman has been apprehended in possession of the lost ring. When presented in court, Dushyanta remembers his courtship. The fisherman is released from prison with a generous reward and the scene shifts to heaven. In heaven, a nymph looking after Shakuntala has just observed (from heaven) that the annual spring festival will not be taking place at Dushyanta’s palace and descends to earth to find out why it has been cancelled. For the majority of act six, the nymph observes Dushyanta’s pain and sorrow (expressed by painting Shakuntala and falling in love with the painting) because of his forgetfulness and guilt over Shakuntala’s abandonment. However, the act ends with a call to arms, when Indra, the king of the Gods, needs Dushyanta’s help to fend off invading demons. Travelling through heaven after winning victory for the Gods, in act seven, Dushyanta asks his heavenly charioteer to take him to a hermitage in the mountains where Indra’s parents live. While there, he sees a child, whom he ‘recognizes’ as his own and then reunites with Shakuntala as well. A 19th-century reading of Śakuntalā takes us into a territory wherein the play (and performance more generally) functions as a melodramatic surrogate (see note 10 of this chapter) to performatively resolve impossible contradictions and desires of the late 19th-century intelligentsia to make concerns over princely power, princely and brahman relations, and representations of femininity and sexuality legible and legitimate to the lay public. By choosing to translate this play, Kirloskar was attuned to the ethos of the age, in which, ‘[T]here had emerged an elite sub-section of the colonial intelligentsia consisting of lawyers, pleaders and other administrative personnel, who over the previous two or three decades, had worked their way into senior bureaucratic positions.’36 The intelligentsia was acutely aware of its elite position and the exponential privilege they enjoyed, and had at the same time, to position themselves as representatives, with knowledge of all the subaltern others in India. While magazines and journals routinely published articles about the condition of the subaltern classes,37 the theatre offered a different possibility—of speaking to the subaltern classes on their terms and in a language that they could understand: epic and history that was all legible through the popular traditions of

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itinerant theatre. This was especially true because ‘colonial modernity had not led to the creation of large-scale reading publics, [and so] these processes of scriptural transfer from oral to printed forms did not correspond with the dissemination of the idea of a laicised knowledge into social common sense.’38 Unlike printed materials, however, travelling theatre did operate through large-scale theatrical publics, for whom these plays were a form of laicised knowledge—and the gradual desire to ignore the requests of aristocratic patrons (see below) suggests that the theatre was a commercial venture, succeeding through broad, individualised interests, especially by transforming traditionally-known stories into a dramatic theatre. The play depicts Dushyanta (and ideal rajas) in flattering ways: as hunters, warriors, just rulers who protect both the venerable and marginal people in their kingdoms, as poets, painters and lovers as well as those who fulfil their duties to the gods. But these qualities are not stable, and Dushyanta needs to navigate them as they change in the course of the play. While he first appears as an able-bodied hunter, his transformation in act six is less than ideal: he wallows in sorrow, and his body itself undergoes a change as he mourns his decision to cast Shakuntala away. From the hard-bodied hunter of the first act—lean and with taut muscles and a preternatural ability to hunt, unaffected by the sun’s scorching rays—the king becomes virtually incapacitated in act six: ‘His lips are pale with sighs/ his eyes wan from brooding at night/ like a gemstone ground in polishing/ the fiery beauty of his body/ makes his wasted form seem strong.’39 And at the same time, in this incapacitated, swooning state, Dushyanta recreates Shakuntala in a painting, only to heighten the emotional drama and the erotic economy of the play until their reunion in act seven. Dushyanta’s transformation from a hard-bodied stud into a languid man of leisure and sentiment in the face of a lost love closely resembles the fortunes of 19th-century aristocrats in India, especially once they lost their political power. Throughout the 18th century, princely power had been demonstrated in public and negotiated in private with performing women as mediatory conduits. Having courtesans in one’s employ was one of the most common forms of entertainment as well as politicking, to smooth over delicate affairs of the state and demonstrate refinement by supporting music and dance. Rulers used courtesans in a variety of public activities to project their power into the public and demonstrate their cultivation in the world. For the tawaifs (a particularly highranking designation of courtesan) of Lucknow, their prestige also depended upon such public appearances and it increased their value as performers.40 This practice was so important and ubiquitous that one reads about it in nearly every travelogue, diary or memoir from

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colonial India, in one form or another, whether to applaud or condemn it.41 Colonial officials knew very much how this practice worked, and actively participated in such activities to curry favour with kings and other potentates—Warren Hastings (1732–1818; Governor of Bengal 1773–1785) encouraged participation in such activities for diplomatic purposes.42 However, with the decline of the sovereign authority of these potentates and kings after 1818, and subsequent conquests both militarily and diplomatically, these practices slowly eroded and came to be seen as both excessively indulgent as well as morally flawed, given that payment to courtesans could eventually lead to intercourse. As I mentioned above, any progeny from courtesans or from multiple wives (some of whom were previously courtesans) taken by kings could not always be provided for without a gradual dissolution of territorial integrity, especially after the East India Company and then the British government took control of foreign policy and kings could no longer expand their territories to give as inheritances for their many children. Janaki Bakhle’s work on Indian classical music in courtly settings is topical here. She details the production of music at the court of a ‘liberal patron of the arts’: Maharaja Sayaji Rao Gaekwad of Baroda.43 She characterises him as ‘progressive’ and ‘enlightened’ and ‘unlike the rulers of numerous other princely states, who typically pursued lives of playboy pleasures without responsibility’.44 But his progressivism stems precisely from the fact that Sir T. Madhav Rao, a brahman who had previously been employed in two princely courts, educated him.45 The education Sayaji Rao received was designed specifically to discourage aristocratic excess in the patronage of the musician’s ‘workshop’, which was normally seen ‘as a department in disrepair, and urgent need of reform’.46 The things needing reform were the arbitrary gifts given to musicians and female performers, resulting in excessive expenditures. The need to reform a musician’s workshop and, therefore, the associated aristocratic sensibility should remind us of Dushtyanta’s absorption in painting, poetry and music in act six, which cause him to neglect his political duties as a king and lead a lifestyle of dissolution. Dushyanta’s ululating and languor, and his actions while separated from Shakuntala, seem indicative of a particular kind of prince too engaged in vain and effeminate pursuits: music, poetry, painting, for example. He seems to whimsically neglect his political duties rather than fulfil them. Ironically, the cure for his situation is precisely something an Indian prince could not possibly hope to do in late 19th-century India: take up arms against invading ‘demons’ in the aid of Indra. Since kings in colonial India had no real political power, except when they supported the British authorities, whether the East India Company or the crown, later on, they were almost resigned to their roles as ridiculous

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patrons of the arts, for which they were perpetually feminised and labelled as aesthetes.47 Their activities remained restricted to the kind of hunting decried in the first act of Śakuntalā while their more significant (historical and legendary) roles as protectors of brahmans and the laity against invading foreign demons (read: the British) never materialised once they were made the puppets of first the East India Company, and then the crown. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon, whereby rulers of princely states were subordinated both politically and culturally comes from Rani Lakshmi Bai’s husband, Raja Gangadhar Rao (d. 1853) of Jhansi. Before the 1857 rebellion, since he did not have a surviving heir, Gangadhar Rao adopted his cousin’s son, whom the East India Company had deemed illegitimate for succession. His state was on the verge of annexation since the East India Company had decreed that princely states without heirs would become their property—which is one of the reasons why his wife Queen Lakshmi Bai (1828–1858) rebelled against Company rule. Gangadhar Rao’s memory had been emasculated after his death: as a generous benefactor and participant in the theatre he had established in Jhansi, he was portrayed in British texts as living a ‘debauched lifestyle’ and they also ‘elaborate upon his penchant for playing the female lead in his plays’, according to Harleen Singh, which was ‘evidence of pathological degeneracy’.48 While Singh mentions that his patronage of the arts was not quite so reprehensible in Indian texts, the displacement of a lack of political activity onto the aesthetic sphere, which consisted loosely of theatre, music and the artist’s warehouse seems difficult to ignore, and also topically relevant for Śakuntalā, especially with regards to Indian rajas, nawabs, princes and other potentates. The character of Shakuntala can also be projected into this historical backdrop—her character resonates allegorically as the image of a displaced woman, who no longer has the means to support herself via her former public function as an entertainer and teacher of the refined sensibilities and pleasure. Significantly, there is precious little scholarship that theorises (rather than historicises) gender and constructs of gender, especially with reference to courtesan cultures—female performance traditions— and sexuality in precolonial India that would enable a more nuanced understanding of the changes in 19th-century sexual politics without reference to various western notions of morality and license. Indeed, if there is an overdetermined superstructure expressing the inflated opprobrium of the upper castes towards performing women generally, then it is precisely one derived from the importation of gender-based morality from England, following the sexual politics of the late 18th century with regard to actresses and the virtues or vices of women—a

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point made by Kate Teltscher in her study of travelogues.49 Even the earliest of colonial-era intellectuals, such as the eminent and understudied Balshastri Jambhekar (1812–1846), picked up on such social mores imported from overseas as a middle-class sensibility and inveighed against the sexual license and conditions of performing women in his bilingual newspaper the Bombay Durpan.50 In South Asia, few of the imported commonplace assumptions about public women were true: performing women could be very wealthy, publicly visible and even on occasion politically redoubtable.51 Cinematic representations such as Umrao Jaan (1980) and their novelistic precursors express a more recent morality and sexuality that damages our ability to reimagine the period. We have difficulty imagining any, even high-ranking performers designated ‘Jaan’ as agents in their own right, actively choosing alliances, and bettering their positions. Despite such a formidable presence, these performing women were also liminal and vulnerable, as structural change in society saw them expeditiously denigrated as prostitutes in no more than a few short generations. Most importantly, what can we say of sexuality in an era where Indian kings were slowly abstaining from their long-standing practice of fathering many children with many women, wives or courtesans who often became wives? Based on the few negative portrayals of aristocrats and their lives of leisure and pleasure, can one think of Foucault’s ars erotica and pleasure as a desubjectifying process, in which female performers and their patrons forget themselves, their own specific identities? Sanjay Gautam’s recent work points to just such a process, of pleasure, eros, as escape or dispensation with identity.52 Reading over notions of pathological degeneracy as well as Dushyanta’s forgetful state in act six, one is tempted to view Indian rajas, the pursuit of pleasure and the image of the female performer in an erotic economy that privileged desubjectification, however temporarily. Why else would Dushyanta lose himself, and how else could love be radical and subversive, if it didn’t entail a loss of one’s own identity? But such structures were quickly losing their place in Indian society. Indeed, even interpretations of the character of Shakuntala followed this trajectory, first as a rustic maiden of nature in the early part of the 19th century and as a fallen woman in the latter half and early 20th century.53 It is well known that displaced and unemployed courtesans themselves travelled with armies and were a concern for the colonial state—so much so that their health was forcibly examined and monitored by colonial authorities.54 The contagious diseases acts of 1864–1869 in India were implemented as a calculated decision to prevent the spread of venereal disease in the army through courtesans

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who had lost their former social prestige as norms changed. Within the text of the play, the vidūṣak or clown astutely observes that Dushyanta has turned the ascetics’ ashram into a veritable pleasure garden—ogling the three women as they pick flowers, then courting one and leaving a ring as a token, perhaps payment for ‘services’ rendered—the slippage in the 19th century is palpable. While we are to take the vidūṣak’s comment about turning the ashram into a pleasure garden as a joke, watching women singing in the play against the historical backdrop of performance traditions behoves us to integrate the former into the latter; the vidūṣak’s comments appear instead sardonic and timely.55 Both the ring-as-token and Dushyanta’s escapade approximate various aspects of princely power and the fallen state of a certain class of women; both are indispensable 19thcentury discourses. Aristocratic pleasure (almost in any form, except perhaps hunting and the abominable shikar parties) came to be seen as decadent and overly indulgent especially since associated practices interwove diplomacy, politics, various kinds of public ceremony— which engaged the service of female performers. At the same time, dismantling such performative structures, so pervasive in society, also created large classes of underemployed women who transformed their performance into one of a more sexual nature.56

THE ECONOMIES OF PERFORMANCE When the Kirloskar Natak Mandali or Kirloskar Drama Troupe staged their first production of Śakuntalā on 31 October 1880 in Pune, all of the aforementioned topics made their way into the press and contributed to a general, popular understanding of the play in one form or another. Below, I focus on interrelated issues that have received little attention when it comes to the play’s reception as well as the troupe’s travels over the coming decades. These include the aristocratic commitments of the troupe, especially patronage patterns (between the troupe, colonial officials and also rajas and other aristocrats) and also ongoing current events that featured aristocratic personalities. I characterise Śakuntalā as an expression of symptomatic breakdown in social relations, but my argument is not limited to the play itself, but also the Kirloskar troupe more generally; some to the 1880s specifically and some for the decades up to the 1920s. Other plays figuring royal personages and divine and epic courts can also be viewed generally in ways similar to Śakuntalā, especially plays such as Indar Sabha (1853).57 However, a few topics are specific to Śakuntalā as a play. Historically, the play served as a

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kind of mechanism for the public to process the prominent court case of the era—the Barve defamation case—which brought together many of the aforementioned topics. The troupe’s repeated performances and travels sustained temporary affective economies, triangulating relations between colonial authorities, rajas and the brahman middleclass, while discourses of courtesanship also percolate into the theatre in other ways. Issues of courtesanship and the displacement of female performers were most evident in the way the playhouse was configured as a hierarchical space in the 19th century. Theatrical playbills are especially pertinent here and they attest not just to the hierarchies of space within, but also the popularity of Śakuntalā.58 The Victoria Nashikkar Sangit Mandali or the Nashik Victorian Music-[drama] Company (VNSM) also performed Śakuntalā, for example, riding the wave of enthusiasm Kirloskar had generated. The VNSM’s many remnant wall posters, of Śakuntalā and other productions, attest to a few spatial and other configurations.59 Figure 3.2 shows a drenched and damaged playbill of the VNSM’s performance of Śakuntalā, while VNSM’s others wall posters advertise plays entitled Saṅgīt Veṇisaṁhār or Destruction of the Braid, a Musical and Sāgra Saṅgīt Raṅgī Nāyakīṇ Prahasan or A Musical Farce about Rangi the Actress. Such wall posters provide a surfeit of empirical data for us in matters of theatre spaces as well as attendees. I want to draw attention to two interrelated issues that also reflect topics of interest for the Kirloskar company and its production of Śakuntalā: the mention of prostitutes (veśyā) directly on the playbill and the spaces in which the plays were staged. As I’ve mentioned above, towards the end of the 19th century, female performers were gradually dubbed prostitutes as they lost their powerful public function. In the playbills I discussed within the introduction (Figures 0.1 and 0.2), female performers were listed as kalāvantiṇī or nāyakīṇī—artist or actress. Unlike those wall posters, Figure 3.2 and others (see note 59) instead list all female performers as veśyā, the word for prostitute in many Indian languages. Such a gradual historical change is evident well into the 1920s and beyond and is a topic of more than a little research, touching on various aspects of performance, such as dance and music, religiosity and notions of femininity.60 These women were admitted only at twice the price of another kind of woman listed on the playbill: the kulastrī, literally family woman. While exact seating arrangements and ticketing are always difficult to know, at least some theatres reserved the first balcony for women entirely—with prostitutes on one side and family women on the other.61 One of Kirloskar’s reviewers found it extremely licentious to have these two

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Figure 3.2: Saṅgīt Śākuntal poster Courtesy: Directorate of Archives, Government of Maharashtra.

groups in the theatre simultaneously and expressed his frustration over their affective responses. In act three, when Dushyanta and Shakuntala elope, the reviewer (‘Enemy of Theatre’) mentions that the women in the audience were very eager to clap—and began their applause before the men in the audience!62 Presumably, women expressing their approval of such a union—whether family women or prostitutes—incensed his anger: how dare they have opinions and take pleasure in the romance! How dare they approve of such sexually implicit material! He further goes on to mention that the drama is,

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in fact, little more than tamāśā, a form of popular entertainment known for its ribaldry and sexual humour. The wall poster about Sāgra Saṅgīt Raṅgī Nāyakīṇ Prahasana (a Musical Farce about Rangi the Actress) is unique even beyond its ability to provide empirical evidence of historical change. It also portrays the romanticisation of Rangi the Actress—just as social discourse severely chastises and omits public women from their occupations, the actress is recreated as representation rather than reality—though as a farce, one cannot specifically say how she is represented. Similarly, the organisation of all these spaces—theatres or otherwise—also suggests a theatre caught between the tensions of patronage and more commercial theatre. Figure 3.2 and others advertise the location as Kādar Bhāī’s Koṭhā, Brother Kadar’s Salon. But ‘salon’ doesn’t quite capture the meaning—the word koṭhā is more proximal to ‘whorehouse’ today. Yet others advertise Rāje Bahādūr Yāṅcī Dukhāṁbī, the Honorable Sir’s Tent. A du-khāṁbī, literally ‘two-poles’ would technically be something erected adjacent to a wall, with two-poles to hold up some kind of ceiling, usually, a tent to facilitate some kind of event, whether theatrical or otherwise. ‘Bahādūr’ as a term is also interesting—it was a title given to those who were knighted in colonial India, thus connecting performance to various public personalities in the service of the state in some form or another, and also to female performers. The VNSM’s extant playbills linger as remarkable artefacts of an era when the theatre was a mixed, commingled space and a space that could have been temporary as well. Certainly not stable, such resonances that we see on these playbills retain the multiple presences of patronage, performing women and disciplinary and sexual mores that have yet to be fully determined by an ascendant middle-class seeking recognition and respectability in their colonial milieu. For that ascendant class, the Barve defamation case became a public sensation in the early 1880s, covered in Indian and Britishowned newspapers alike; the court proceedings were published in their entirety in the Mahratta newspaper. It highlighted aristocratic commitments to the theatre concisely and intricately, and especially the place of brahman and other government servants in the service of various aristocratic personalities. It exposed the contradictory desires among brahman intelligentsia: to both be part of an aristocratic, waning system, for the symbolic value it conferred and which remained relatively resplendent in the imagination; but also the opposite, to leave such systems of sociability. The controversy rested on the status of the psychological health of Shivaji VI (1863–1883; reign 1871–1883). His deteriorating mental health became a cause for public concern.

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According to the doctor appointed to treat him, Patrick Murphy, the young Maharaja suffered ‘from melancholia accompanied with delusions’ (my italics) from 1879 onwards, improving at first when he retreated to the hill station of Mahableshwar and then becoming even more serious upon his return in 1880 to Pune when he began to suffer from ‘dementia’. He also became violent soon thereafter and died three years later in 1883 when he attacked a colonially appointed English soldier who was his ‘caretaker’.63 While this was the official report, the Indian press such as the Mahratta newspaper—an English-language weekly owned and operated by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), considered one of the most important leaders of the early Indian nationalist struggle—published a series of articles in which Tilak, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856–1895; editor of the sister Marathilanguage newspaper the Kesari) openly accused government officials such as the knighted ‘Rao Bahadoor’ Mahadew Wassoodew Barve (Vāsudev Vāman Barve; the official Kolhapur state accounts keeper) of wrongdoing.64 While Tilak and Agarkar eventually lost the libel case and issued a public apology in their newspapers,65 connections between Śakuntalā, the play, and the treatment of Shivaji VI are several, beyond the melancholia and delusions that liken Shivaji VI to Dushyanta’s swoony state in act six. Reviews of the play from 1881 (when the play was performed in full) debate the utility, purpose and necessity of performing drama at all.66 Furthermore, whether drama can be respectable or not frequently becomes a topic of discussion. One of the reviewers explicitly speaks about current events and politics, mentioning illiteracy, the growing social ills of the age, such as the neglected advocacy of widow remarriage by a younger generation of nationalists, some kind of tumult in Baroda. But before this, he goes out of his way to emphasise the Maharaja of Kolhapur’s ‘incident’ at the hands of Barve—the Barve affair. Remarkably, this reviewer, based on his sympathies for widow remarriage, does not fit neatly into expected political allegiances: he progressively supports widow remarriage but also dismisses the theatre, so carefully nurtured by universityeducated intellectuals.67 The Kirloskar troupe itself also got involved in the Barve affair by donating approximately 400 rupees from one of their performances to cover the legal fees for Tilak and Agarkar’s libel defence.68 Even the troupe’s manager (from after the troupe became professional) recalled in 1929, nearly 50 years after the play’s first performance, that it was contemporaneous with the Barve-Kolhapur incident.69 Simultaneously, the playwright and the company both came under the royal patronage of the Holkars of Indore, where Kirloskar

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had not performed—and where the company would never perform a full play in Kirloskar’s lifetime.70 It was not a completely idle gift. The younger son of Maharaja Tukojirao Holkar II quickly decided to offer Kirloskar suggestions on what to write and perform next. When Kirloskar decided to translate a different play from the one the young prince had suggested, news somehow reached the prince’s ears and he demanded a reading of the new play at his own court in Indore; Kirloskar travelled there promptly with one actor, and gave the reading that the young prince had demanded.71 In addition to Indore, other major courts offering patronage included Gwalior, Baroda and of course, Kolhapur. Kirloskar received similar patronage and invitations to perform from various smaller aristocratic patrons, including at the cities of Sangli, Dhar, Miraj and Satara.72 Satara, like Kolhapur, was also a significant princely state whose main aristocracy were descendants of Shivaji Bhosale (1627/30–1680), the emblematic and iconic Maratha-sardar-turned-king, who is credited with establishing an independent Maratha kingdom during the reign of the last great Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618–1707). (And of course, the vocal support of private individuals never waned.) Such allegiances—fealties?—had both rewards as well as some negative consequences, well into the 1920s. On the one hand, these forms of patronage (symbolic and material) greatly increased a troupe’s prestige; on the other, troupes had to deal with the arbitrary demands of the patron, who may request one scene from one play, a song from another and so on, as is evident with Tukojirao II’s son, who was displeased when Kirloskar decided upon something other than what the young prince had in mind.73 Furthermore, while these visits were lucrative, in the time it took to travel, troupes could have easily made more money performing commercially.74 Economics, therefore, dictated why the Kirloskar Company was almost always on the move during the years 1884 to 1890, and we get a sense of how broadly they travelled during their first decade. One of the most remarkable things about the company is that aside from the festival season in India, roughly late September to early November, the troupe was always on the road, leaving family behind and sending home remittances from their earnings.75 When they travelled, in the smaller towns where they almost always had contacts that included landlords of various stripes, they were given a hero’s welcome. These productions were often sarkari or government-sponsored—once again with local landlords and aristocracy present. Figure 3.3 is a still of the entire cast of the Kirloskar’s production of Saṅgīt Saubhadra, which I speak about in the following chapter.

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Figure 3.3: Cast of Saṅgīt Saubhadra (1882) Courtesy: British Library Board Shelfmark 2/2(21).

I mention it here because one can easily see the character of Arjun on the left with his headdress that contains a tassel of pearls dangling from the right corner. (Kirloskar is the young scholar seated in front.) Despite comments from indulging colonial figures such as the then professor of Sanskrit at Deccan College, Pune, who remarked that he sees before him the rishis of old, the clothing in these pictures is quite contemporary.76 The saris are draped in a nauvārī style— or nine-yard style—typical for women in western India to this day. Comparing Arjun’s headdress, Figure 3.4: Shahu I of Kolhapur, however, to a contemporary one official portrait from 1912 worn by the Raja of Kolhapur is Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ quite fascinating. Figure 3.4 is a Shahu_of_Kolhapur. photograph of the successor to Shivaji VI, Shahu I (r. 1884–1922), and it depicts him in full British

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imperial regalia. However, what remains unchanged is his headdress, which similarly contains a tassel of pearls as well as thick silken strings wrapped ornamentally around the headdress. This style seems to have been the preferred style for the Maharajas of Kolhapur and is also a prominent part of Shivaji VI’s headdress—though I haven’t been able to confirm this specifically. Much like the nauvārī sari, it can hardly be coincidental that Arjun’s headdress and that of the Raja of Kolhapur are nearly identical. Such resemblances demonstrate the essentially public and accessible nature of these occasions, and how senior government and aristocratic personages made their presences felt by erecting tents, having the square or road and environs cleaned, erecting lanterns and of course, officiating the performances while seated in a prominent place where they were as much on display as the performance itself, often mirroring the performance in their costume.77 (Of course, noteworthy is the way Indian rajas were co-opted into imperial networks of signification and representation—they too became vassals much like Kirloskar himself.) Meanwhile, a recent article found that the Satara crown (whose line had lapsed) was part of the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia, USA. That crown too displays a similar tassel of pearls and the article itself also highlights the similarities between the Kolhapur and Satara styles.78 Given that many aristocratic dominions were not technically part of British colonial India—they were relatively independent states—such resemblances and interpretations thus brought audiences, split between ‘British’ and ‘Princely’ India, into one affective economy. They also recreated ideal forms of patronage and relationships in performance, despite the overt and apparent real historical conflicts, especially given that discourse over the princes was constantly in the news— over the Barve affair and similar brahman–aristocratic relationships, over princely education, the need for princes to have a constitution, etc.79 Travelling between British India and the princely states was thus transactionally significant, binding these two domains through performative symbolism. Patronage, however, was not limited to Indians and Indian rajas. One of the most poignant moments where we read the intimations of ‘fealty’ and of those who were in Kirloskar’s position to patronise colonial officials is in a set of lugubriously intoned letters between B.P. Kirloskar and a Major General Hewett. These tell a different story from that of the princes and princely interactions, indicating not only a different kind of attitude towards ‘subjects’ but also towards spectatorship. After Hewett saw a rehearsal of Śakuntalā on 5 September 1881, he wrote to Kirloskar using particularly indulgent language: ‘I cannot tell you how much obliged I feel to you, for having afforded me such a very pleasant

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evening last Saturday, by inviting me to a rehearsal of the “Shakoontala” performance at the Deccan College.’80 Hewett also presented the main actors in Śakuntalā with gifts of various kinds—watches and clothes, in addition to buying approximately 75 tickets for the production, demonstrating a keen awareness of the practices of patronage in colonial India,81 mimicking the kinds of gifts aristocratic patrons would give to performers, whether courtesans or otherwise (and unlike the Indian rajas, it doesn’t seem that anybody suggested reforming his arbitrary gifting). The advertisement for the production, appearing in the Times of India, even mentioned that the play will be performed ‘under the patronage of Major-General W.S. Hewett!’82 Following his initial greeting in the letter, Hewett further praises the rehearsal with exceedingly clement language, describing his own enraptured state as well as the performance’s perfection: That I was thoroughly pleased, you, I trust feel sure from the fact of the great interest I was taking in the performance the entire evening and the attention I was devoting to each act [as] it was being performed. To my idea it was faultless. So well was everything done.

These formal proclamations undergird various relationships of patronage that exist in these settings—especially between coloniser and colonised. Hewett trusts and is pleased; he feels obliged and takes uncommonly ‘great interest’. And the performance is, apparently, faultless. The letter thus begins with overdetermined language that registers as artificial rather than genuine—not in the least because convention may have dictated letters be written in such a manner, but because Hewett’s attitude proscribes any substantive discussion of the play and the rehearsal.83 The rehearsal is perfect, lacks fault—even though it is a rehearsal. Rather than any real kind of investment in the performance at hand, Hewett is performing the role of an authority figure, graciously treating his subjects with a certain noblesse oblige. Such congenial appraisals and indulgent attitudes barely veil dynamics of power in the given situation when we read the next two paragraphs of his letter. After asking to be invited to another rehearsal, ‘if you intend repeating the rehearsal you will invite me again,’84 he writes further: ‘I am told you will have it again on a grand hall on Saturday, 17th September if so I trust you will give me timely notice thereof through … that I may come to it if I possibly can.’ This strikes me odd too—if he knows of a performance, why ask to be invited to another rehearsal using conditionals (if, you will)? It is all very obliging, as though there is something to be gained by being so concerned: marked by a lordly concern for his subjects, especially the paternalistic, ‘I may come to

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it if I possibly can.’ The hierarchical relationship that has hereto been partially veiled is disclosed in the following and final paragraph, in which Hewett goes out of his way to point out just one error during the performance: The native gentleman who made that speech after the performance and made allusion to my attendance there erred greatly in terming me Major Hewett. I am ‘General Hewett’ and have been that for over six years now. I was a Major once upon a time, but that was 21 years ago!!

The letter concludes, ‘Please acknowledge the receipt of this letter…’, requiring a response from Kirloskar. That is, everything in the performance was perfect, except the way in which he paid deference to Hewett. If the final paragraph, in asking Kirloskar to correctly address him in public has not made Hewett’s position clear, Kirloskar’s selfeffacing letter provides further evidence of these quasi-feudal ties. Kirloskar begins by mentioning that he is ‘proud to acknowledge’ the ‘favour of yesterday’s date’. He provides a few details about arrangements, and then resorts to flattery: I had no correct idea as to how our exertions were that night crowned with success, but now I am confident that the performance was on the whole capital as I am sure that the remark ‘faultless’ has emanated from a person who weighs merits and demerits in a nice scale.

This too, is formal, performative language, expressing only the power relations that separate and bind Kirloskar and Hewett in the activities of colonial governance and sociability—especially granting that a colonial official is a ‘fair’ judge. Much like Hewett’s final paragraph, Kirloskar’s valediction expresses his own regret and inability to immediately rectify the ‘native gentleman’ who incorrectly saluted Hewett: I express sincere regret and hope to be pardoned for the error which the gentleman who made the speech unwittingly committed. I discovered the error so soon as the words ‘Major’ fell from his lips but it was then too late to correct it and I then hoped to beg your pardon on a personal interview. Hoping to be excused....85

As is the case with all performances, one cannot stop the show to correct mistakes—one can only hope to be excused by the audience or to excuse oneself at a later date. Kirloskar’s apology falls into the latter category; it further mentions that he had already wanted to apologise, only that

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the occasion to do so had not yet presented itself. I have dwelt on these moments for two reasons pertinent to this essay—the one about the kinds of patronage and deference demonstrated by this interaction, and the other about how this deference operates in various spaces. In the first case, the rehearsal took place at the university and it is well known that the university’s ambit was akin to a new kind of patronage, demonstrated by a range of scholarly materials. The most obvious of these sources is Gauri Viswanathan’s now-classic study Masks of Conquest (1989), in which she describes how various conciliations were made to entice brahman students into the university classroom, including creating a separate classroom for lower-caste students—a point made about western India as well.86 These observations, however, do not go deep enough. Institutions, such as Poona Hindu College, which later became Deccan College, were established very soon after the defeat of the Peshwa or chief minister of the Maratha confederacy in 1818. The Peshwa had a policy of offering a dakśīṇā or gift to brahmans to pursue Sanskrit learning. In the years after 1818, Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859), the governor of the Bombay Presidency (in office 1819– 1827), perpetuated certain forms of patronage and governance in order to maintain continuity and smooth transition from the defeated Maratha confederacy to the British colonial government. Elphinstone retained the dakśīṇā, which was more or less an informal connection between the political powers and brahmans. Owing to this historical connection between the state and brahmans, the brahmans exercised a formidable hegemony over many forms of social life—something quite unique to western India.87 The continuation of the dakśīṇā under Ephinstone’s guidance was part of a policy of appeasement towards the brahmans of Maharashtra, whom the colonial authorities had cause to fear.88 By 1857, only 12,000 rupees were distributed and the fund itself was entirely taken over by the Department of Education in 1859—but the fund committee, as well as the institutions of higher education that the fund had established, were dominated by brahman intelligentsia, who carefully supervised literary activities sponsored by the colonial state.89 Such activities had more than adequately consolidated brahmans and colonial authorities in projects of colonial governance—a theme well known among the populace as well: in a farce from the 1880s, one character laments that the English ‘took’ our Vedas, to which his companion responds, ‘But isn’t it our people who teach them?’90 Despite everything, these relationships were uneasy and more accommodated than willing. As the opinions of the two wits noted just above indicates, associations between brahmans and the colonial authorities were functional at best, not without a strong undercurrent of disappointment, theft and loss. But relationships between Indian

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aristocratic patrons and their brahman and other performers were also fraught, undergoing changes in giving and expectations. Given the kinds of demands placed upon performers in theatre troupes, one troupe even declined the aristocratic patronage of the Maharaja of Gwalior, but still used the maharaja’s name to advertise.91 Travel brought the Kirloskar company and others into contact with patrons of various stripes, in cities all over western India: Mumbai, Pune, Belgaum, Satara, Kolhapur, Dharwad, Nashik, Indore, Amravati, Dhar, Nagpur, Akola, Gwalior, Kashi, Pandhrpur, Miraj, Hubli. I have only analysed a few of these locations above with relation to the rajas of Kolhapur and Gwalior, while also mentioning both Pune and Mumbai as sites where colonial authorities also offered their forms of patronage. Both kinds of patronage, however, remained constantly under stress. When colonial authorities indulgently came and watched productions, their presence simultaneously underlined colonial hierarchies. Meanwhile, the maharajas of Gwalior and others, for example, adopted an entirely different attitude towards performance, expecting sway over the production in return for patronage. Both situations were unsustainable and yet such triangulated relationships, between brahmans, colonial officials and Indian aristocrats, were constituted in performance through the ways in which Kirloskar successfully bridged the inner and multiple outer worlds of his performances. Moreover, for a decade, the Kirloskar Company seems to have sustained itself only on two full plays—Śakuntalā and another play Saṅgīt Saubhadra or A Musical About Subhadra. The early Kirloskar company’s only other real drama was left unfinished—a translation of Bhavabhuti’s 9th-century play the Uttararāmacaritam or The Later Life of Rāma. This trajectory too, as I explain in the following chapter, intimately harmonises with and engages the broader outer world beyond the theatre. In one of the more telling moments about Sanskrit drama’s relevance to his present, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, one of the two editors involved in the Barve affair, expressed his preference for the plays of Shakespeare and Bhavabhuti over those of Kālidāsa.92 Arguing that drama should be about real life, he suggests neither the love (śṛṇgār) Dushyanta feels for Shakuntala nor the compassion (karuṇā) we may feel for her is relevant or ‘real’ in any sense of the word. Briefly—and I take up this issue in the following chapter—how could the aristocratic privileges of love, the easy elopement in a hermitage near the forest, how could these possibly approximate the vanishing 19th century? And, certainly, there were no aristocrats waging war against any invading demons, against the English, at least not by the end of the century. Instead, English officials had taken over patronage structures. Combined with the changing perceptions of public women in colonial India and the conditions that sustained them,

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the character of Shakuntala came to be seen rather negatively by the early 20th century. As is often the case with patriarchy, her freeness (rather than Dushyanta’s proclivities) became indicative of her fallen state. Undoubtedly, a focus on the fallen-ness of a woman prompted Agarkar to espouse Bhavabhuti’s Uttararāmacaritam over Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā: the former focuses on the fallen woman as a pitiable object while the latter permits her to be recovered. Neither, of course, offer ‘love’ as a middleclass possibility. For these, only Saṅgīt Saubhadra (see Chapter 4) suffices. Whereas Śakuntalā had generated ‘an unprecedented order of imaginative discovery and rediscovery around the globe until the midtwentieth century’,93 its effects in India too were far from insignificant. I have chosen, therefore, to focus on the concrete functioning of a worldliterature play text within a specific locale. Indeed, not all literature that travels remains an imaginative abstraction, and the local ramifications— the performative consequences in this case—can be substantial. With the play’s popularisation, its Marathi-speaking audience in western India began to imagine itself as something more than what it was. One must consider the son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala in the play is Bharata; the modern name of the Republic of India is Bhārat Gaṇarājya—literally the Rule of the Union of the Descendants of Bharata. But I get ahead of myself here, and such a prehistory is superseded by Kirloskar’s next play, Saṅgīt Saubhadra, which offers a future, rather than simply a past. For most of the 19th century, when social relations underwent significant changes and all sectors of society saw their traditional allegiances (whether or not those were coerced or willing) renegotiated, Śakuntalā brought a modicum of nostalgic stability. Its performances, the associated infrastructure for supporting the troupe and signalling its prestige—the play and the troupe’s travels sustained melodramatic, surrogate affective economies. From the letters and communications above, it is evident that performing required enacting various relationships outside the performance itself. As these accounts also indicate, with the development of an urban theatrical public, individualised patronage could not compete with a mass commercial one. Government officials and maharajas were thus quickly made into rarified expressions of fealties that increasingly held little purchase on the modern theatre—but that is another story for the next chapter.

NOTES   1 M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 87; Raymond Schwab, Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East,

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 2

  3   4

  5

 6

  7



1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). For a recent reassertion, see especially Chapter 2, ‘Orientalism and World Literature’ in Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016). Some compelling recent scholarship grounding the colonial history of comparative literature is: Siraj Ahmed, ‘Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial History of Comparative Literature’, Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 296–326; Baidik Bhattacharya, ‘On Comparatism in the Colony: Archives, Methods, and the Project of Weltliteratur’, Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (2016): 677–711; Michael Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 39–54. Amanda Culp, ‘Shakuntala’s Storytellers: Translation and Performance in the Age of World Literature (1789–1912)’, Theatre Journal 70, no. 2 (2018): 133–152, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2018.0024, accessed 18 September 2021. For a more detailed study of the reception, see Dorothy Matilda Figueira, Translating the Orient the Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). See also Vinay Dharwadker (trans., ed.) in Kālidāsa, Abhijnanashakuntalam: The Recognition of Shakuntala (New Delhi: Penguin, 2016), 266–269. See also Todd Curtis Kontje, German Orientalisms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 105–110, 118–132. In the appendices, Dharwadker lists several important productions from the past two centuries. With the exception of two productions by the Hindustani Theatre, in Delhi, founded by the legendary Habib Tanvir (1923–2009), it seems as though no other productions were staged more than a couple of times. The Hindustani Theatre’s productions in 1957– 1958, and again in 1959, were staged a total of 46 times. See Dharwadker, 266–268. By contrast, Kirloskar’s version was staged continuously for over 10 years, and inspired several imitations, as I describe below. Importantly, the play was not necessarily appropriated for nationalist purposes in this era unlike later interpolations of Śakuntalā that Romila Thapar has written about. See Thapar Śakuntalā: Texts, Readings, Histories, Anthem South Asian Studies (London: Anthem, 2002), 238–256. For more on affective economies, see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 46. She writes of hate, my model of hate as an affective economy suggests that emotions do not positively inhabit anybody or anything, meaning that “the subject” is simply one nodal point in the economy, rather than its origin and destination. This is extremely important: it suggests that the sideways and backwards movement of emotions such as hate is not contained within the contours of a subject. The unconscious is hence not the unconscious of a subject, but the failure of presence—or the failure to be present—that constitutes the relationality of subject, objects, signs and others. Given this, affective economies are social and material, as well as psychic.

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I find this definition useful for the way Śakuntalā brings out various relationships—not about hate per se—but certainly emotional bonds between various nodes of society.  8 In this article, I use the words raja, prince, Maharaja and even king interchangeably; just as I use princely state, kingdoms, princely territories and potentate (defined as possessions of the former personages) interchangeably. The reasons are both translational and historical. Historically, in the English language, these many aristocrats of South Asia were diminutively called ‘princes’ because there could only really be one true Queen: Victoria. Elevating her to ‘empress’, however, did little to change the use of the term ‘prince’ in India. Of course, the most accurate contemporary translation of raja and Maharaja would be King and Great King. The way I use the terms elides the complex hierarchies that undergirded colonial discourse on the matter, but these details are not quite as relevant for my argument here, and so I have chosen to be agnostic in terms of how I use them.   9 Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. Roach writes, culture reproduces and re-creates itself by a process that can be best described by the word surrogation. In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into these cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure, … survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates. Because collective memory works selectively, imaginatively, and often perversely, surrogation rarely if ever succeeds. The process requires many trials and at least as many errors. The fit cannot be exact. The intended substitute either cannot fulfil expectations, creating a deficit, or actually exceeds them, creating a surplus. For melodrama, I take my definition from Peter Brooks. He variously defines melodrama as a genre that emerges, ‘at the decadence of the old and at the moment of social and ethical upheaval’; especially after the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarch), the shattering of the myth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically cohesive society, and the invalidation of the literary forms— tragedy, comedy of manners—that depended upon such a society. Melodrama does not simply represent a ‘fall’ from tragedy, but a response to the loss of the tragic vision. It comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern.

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152 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), xviii, 15. While Brooks contextualises his study after the French revolution, his descriptions are significantly applicable to western India as well, obviously with various changes to ‘church’ and ‘Christendom’, for example. 10 Translation, notes Alexander Beecroft, is one of the hallmarks of the relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular literary ecologies. It is because Sanskrit texts were translated into various Indian and European languages that we see the relationship between Marathi vernacular– Sanskrit cosmopolitan. 11 Even as late as the 1870s, various Indian intellectuals complained that Europeans who did not have adequate linguistic skills to understand the language, let alone the texts, were writing Indian history. See Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar, Nibandhamalakar Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar yanchya Kirkola Lekhancha Samgraha [A Collection of the Essayist Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar’s Minor Writings vol. 2], ed. Khanderao Bhikaji Belsare (Mumbai: Job Printing, 1902), 261. Jones himself admits the aid of several pandits in finding sources to translate, finding the most significant aspects of those sources, and in translating. Kālidāsa, Sacontalá; Or, The Fatal Ring: An Indian Drama, trans. William Jones (London: Charlton Tucker, 1870), 8. [See also note 89 about Molesworth and Candy below.] 12 Figueira, Translating the Orient the Reception of Śākuntala in NineteenthCentury Europe, 9. 13 Ibid., 1. 14 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 121–122. 15 Thapar, Śakuntalā, 218–237. 16 In Calcutta, theatres established from the 1860s onwards regularly staged Bengali versions of Sanskrit drama. See Sudipto Chatterjee, The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta, Enactments (Oxford: Seagull Press, 2007), 73–74. Apparently, students were not taught Shakuntala because of it themes of sexuality, but other Sanskrit drama, or episodes from Sanskrit literature were less of a problem. See ibid., 219. 17 Appaji Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi (Puṇe: “Āryabhūṣaṇa” Chāpākhānā, 1903), 38–41. 18 Kumud Mehta, English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century, Ph.D dissertation, University of Bombay, 1960, 189. 19 Vishnu Amrut Bhave, Natya Kavita Samgraha (Pune: Shri Shivaji Chhapkhana, 1885). 20 Parashurám Pant Godbole, ed., Selections from the Marathi Poets, 8th ed. (Bombay: Government Central Book Depot, 1873). 21 V.J. Kirtane (1840–1891) has an epilogue in which characters reject music on stage. See Vinayak Janardan Kirtane, Thorle Madhavrao Peshwe va Jayapal, He Natake (Mumbai: Tutorial Press, 1927), 175–180. 22 Ibid.; Kevin J. Wetmore Jr, Siyuan Liu and Erin B. Mee, Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900–2000 (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2014), 170–174.

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23 Sanjay Joshi, The Middle Class in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). 24 Kirloskar had also cultivated a friendship during his school days in Pune with an itinerant bard. See Shankar Bapuji Mujumdar, Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra (Pune: Jaddghitecchu Chapakhana, 1904), 50. 25 ‘Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 26, Atlas 1909 Edition, Political Divisions – Digital South Asia Library’, http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gaz_ atlas_1909/fullscreen.html?object=26, accessed 24 November 2016. 26 Barbara N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and Their States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–96. For more details on the theoretical aspects of this policy, see Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Origins of Indirect Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 27 The Maratha Confederacy was an alliance of rajas led by the brahman Peshwa, or chief minister, from Pune, all of whom swore nominal allegiance to the Bhosale family, alternatively based in the town of Satara and Kolhapur. Because the Maratha Confederacy was a major power in the 18th century, the defeat of the Maratha Confederacy transferred lands in much of western and central India into East India Company hands. 28 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 24–32. 29 ‘The Charge of Defamation Against Native Papers’, Times of India, 25 January 1882, p. 3. A list of all the articles and press this case generated is too substantial to include. This case was, however, regularly covered in the Times of India during 1882, as well as fully publicised in the Indian-owned newspaper The Mahratta, with full transcriptions of the court proceedings. 30 Harleen Singh, The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 13. 31 ‘Satyajit Ray’s - Shatranj Ke Khilari - Part 2 - YouTube,’ https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=KVq7rWGMoyU, accessed 12 January 2022. 32 Caroline Keen, Princely India and the British: Political Development and the Operation of Empire (London: Tauris, 2012), 90–127. 33 Indian Maharajas were generally assumed to be Ksatriyas (from the warrior caste)—though this was often a contentious issue in western India. See O’Hanlon, n. 26, for more. 34 Romila Thapar’s chapter (and indeed her book) on the Abhijñānashākuntalam partially addresses historical interpretations. I see this article slightly differently. For starters, I don’t presume that the Marathi ecumene was the most important, nor was it representative of all of India; it was however, the only place the play every became popular and relevant outside of elite circles. In this respect, we must take Tagore’s interpretation, whom Thapar cites, with a grain of salt. See Romila Thapar, Śakuntalā: Texts, Readings, Histories (London: Anthem, 2002), 238–256. 35 Kālidāsa, Sacontalá; Or, The Fatal Ring, 8. 36 Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 218. 37 Ibid., 219.

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154 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 38 Ibid., 226. 39 Kālidāsa, Theater of Memory: The Plays of Kālidāsa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 150. 40 Shweta Sachdeva, In Search of the Tawa’if in History Courtesans, Nautch Girls and Celebrity Entertainers in India, Ph.D dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 2008, 72, 139–140. 41 For example, see the appendices to Ketaki Kushari Dyson, A Various Universe: A Study of the Journals and Memoirs of British Men and Women in the Indian Subcontinent, 1765–1856 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). This is but a small selection of the references to dance, courtesanship and performing women in 19th-century diaries and travelogues from South Asia. 42 Ian Woodfield, Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175. 43 Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12. 44 Ibid., 20–21. 45 Rosalind O’Hanlon also mentions that Pratapsinh Bhosale, the reinstalled ‘legitimate’ Maratha ruler was also similarly tutored by an East India Company approved official. In Bhosale’s case, however, the tutor was not a learned brahman, but instead none other than James Grant Duff (1789– 1858), a famous historian whose work History of the Mahrattas (1826) was used as a standard text throughout the 19th century, and is even mentioned by James Mill. Duff ’s job at the court was similar to Sir T. Madhav Rao’s, and Duff was responsible for training Pratapsinh in public administration. See O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology, 27–28. 46 Bakhle, Two Men and Music, 23–24. 47 For example, Queen Victoria granted the widow of Sayaji Rao’s predecessor the authority to adopt an heir, but that reward was in lieu of services to the British during the 1857 revolt, when Sayaji Rao’s predecessor, Khande Rao assisted the British to suppress the uprising rather than take the side of the revolutionaries. Ibid., 22. 48 Harleen Singh, Rani Lakshmi Bai, Queen of Jhansi, and the 1857 Rebellion: Colonial and Postcolonial Representations, Ph.D dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 2002, 41. 49 Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 37–41. 50 Bal Gangadhar Shastri Jambhekar, Memoirs and Writings of Acharya Bal GAngadhar Shastri Jambhekar, 1812–1846: Pioneer of the Renaissance in Western India and Father of Modern Maharashtra, ed. Ganesh Gangadhar Jambhekar, vol. 2 (Poona: Lokashikshana Karyalaya, 1950), 56–61. 51 Veena Talwar Oldenburg, ‘Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India’, Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (1 July 1990): 259–287. 52 Sanjay Kumar Gautam, Foucault and the Kamasutra: The Courtesan, the Dandy, and the Birth of Ars Erotica as Theater in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

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53 Thapar makes this point on a number of occasions, especially with reference to how Rabindranath Tagore, in 1907, dubbed Shakuntala a ‘fallen’ woman, whereas William Jones had been fascinated by her pastoral beauty. See Thapar, Śakuntalā, 200, 219, 232, 241. 54 For more on this issue generally, see Kokila Dang, ‘Prostitutes, Patrons and the State: Nineteenth Century Awadh’, Social Scientist 21:9/11 (1993), 173–196; Philippa Levine, ‘Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 4 (1994): 579–602; Philippa Levine, ‘Orientalist Sociology and the Creation of Colonial Sexualities’, Feminist Review, 65 (2000): 5–21; Rimli Bhattacharya, ‘Promiscuous Spaces and Economies of Entertainment: Soldiers, Actresses and Hybrid Genres in Colonial India’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 41, no. 2 (2014): 50–75. 55 Kālidāsa, Theater of Memory, 107. 56 For a good overview of these discursive and real changes, see the introduction to Anna Morcom, Illicit Worlds of Indian Dance: Cultures of Exclusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 57 See, for example, Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Indar Sabha Phenomenon: Public Theatre and Consumption in Greater India (1853–1956)’, in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 76–114. 58 In fact, Kirloskar’s version inspired at least two other versions during the 1880s—the one advertised on this playbill by the Victoria Nashikkar Sangit Mandali and another translated by someone named Paranjape. I speak about this third version briefly in the final chapter on the farce, where the playwright parodies music drama and especially Śakuntalā. See Bhimrav Balavant Kulkarni, ed., Marāṭhī phārsa: ekoṇisāvyā śatakātīla prātinidhika nivaḍaka phārsāñcā saṅgraha (Puṇe: Mahārāshṭra Sāhitya Parishada, 1987), 224. 59 For images and translations of these wall posters, see Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘The Popular Itinerant Theatre of Maharashtra, 1843–1880’, Asian Theatre Journal 32, no. 1 (June 2015): 212–217. 60 For examples of early scholarship, see Amrit Srinivasan, ‘The Hindu Temple Dancer: Prostitute or Nun?’ Cambridge Anthropology 8 (1983): 73– 99; Amrit Srinivasan, ‘Reform and Revival: The Devadasi and Her Dance’. Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 44 (2 November 1985): 1869–1876. 61 Rajaram Narayan, Kirloskar Sangit Natyagruha: Varnan (Pune: Aryabhushan, 1909), 6. 62 Shankar Bapuji Mujumdar, Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra (Pune: Jagaddhitecchu Chapakhana, 1904), 83–84. 63 ‘Article 5–No Title’, Times of India, 30 October 1879, p. 3; ‘Article 17–No Title’, Times of India, 9 February 1882, p. 6. 64 ‘An Indian Hamlet’, Mahratta, 27 November 1881, pp. 1–2; ‘The Maharaja of Kolhapur II’, Mahratta, 4 December 1881, pp. 2–3; ‘The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the Bombay Dailies’, Mahratta, 11 December 1881, p. 2. 65 Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, ‘Editorial Notes’, Mahratta, 16 July 1882, p. 3.

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156 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 66 For a good collection of reviews, see Mujumdar’s biography of Kirloskar: Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra, 77–97. 67 Ibid., 85–86. 68 Ibid., 102. A sense of what this means: The economic disparity was at times quite startling: M.G. Ranade, as a judge at Nasik, was earning Rs 800 per month in 1875; while Parvatibai Athavale’s husband, a clerk in the customs office in Goa in the early 1880s, earned Rs. 15 per month for nine months of the year, no salary being paid for the remaining three months. See Meera Kosambi, ‘Women, Emancipation and Equality: Pandita Ramabai’s Contribution to Women’s Cause’, Economic and Political Weekly 23, no. 44 (1988): 49. 69 Trymbak Narayan Sathe, ‘Introduction’, in Sangit Saubhadra (Pune: Aryabhushan Press, 1929), 12. 70 M.S. Kanade and Tryambaka Narayana Sathe, Marathi rangabhumica ushahkala; kirloskara nataka mandalice vyacasthapaka Kai. Tryambakarava Sathe yamni anubhavalela (Pune: Vhinasa Buka Stôla, 1968), 77. 71 Ibid., 35, 37. 72 Ibid., 77. 73 There were concrete reasons for not translating what the young prince wanted, as I detail below—mostly about how and which Sanskrit dramas are appropriate. 74 Meera Kosambi, Gender, Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema before Independence (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), 235–236. 75 Kanade and Sathe, Marathi rangabhumica ushahkala; kirloskara nataka mandalice vyacasthapaka Kai. Tryambakarava Sathe yamni anubhavalela., 101–117. 76 Mujumdar, Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra, 77. 77 Kanade and Sathe, Marathi rangabhumica ushahkala; kirloskara nataka mandalice vyacasthapaka Kai. Tryambakarava Sathe yamni anubhavalela., 78. 78 Manoj Dani, ‘The Lost Crown of Satara’, https://www.livehistoryindia. com/story/people/the-lost-crown-of-satara, accessed 24 September 2019. 79 Shahu I was also the subject of controversy—he was denied a coronation by brahmans, who suggested that he was not sufficiently a ksatriya, or of the warrior caste. On whether or not the native princes need a constitution to reform them, the Mahratta ran several articles from June to October of 1881. For the first of these, see ‘A Constitution for Native Rajas’, Mahratta, 19 June 1881, p. 3. 80 For the entire exchange that follows, see Vasant Shantaram Desai (ed.), Vishrabdha Sharada, vol. 2 (Mumbai: H.V. Bhate Prakashan, 1975), 19–21. 81 Mujumdar, Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra, 78, 100. 82 ‘Native Opera’, Times of India, 15 July 1881, p. 3. 83 By using ‘overdetermination’ here, I am using it in a way suggested by Raymond Williams—‘to emphasize relatively autonomous yet of course

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interactive practices’ of literature and culture. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 88. 84 Desai, Vishrabdha Sharada, 2: 19–20. 85 Ibid., 2: 20–21. 86 Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 151–152; Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890-1950 (Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 2008), 33. 87 Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 39. 88 O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology, 26. 89 One such brahman was Krishnashastri Chiplunkar, about whom I have spoken in the previous two chapters, who was one of the first generation of graduates of Poona Hindu College and the chief pandit to Major Thomas Candy, the Marathi translator for the colonial authorities, along with Captain J.T. Molesworth. Candy is further noteworthy because he was the first principal of Poona Hindu College. See James Nelson Fraser, Deccan College: A Retrospect, 1851–1901 (Poona: The author, 1902). 90 Bhimrav Balavant Kulkarni, ed., Marāṭhī phārsa: ekoṇisāvyā śatakātīla prātinidhika nivaḍaka phārsāñcā saṅgraha (Puṇe: Mahārāshṭra Sāhitya Parishada, 1987), 375. 91 Kosambi, Gender, Culture and Performance, 235. 92 Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, ‘Shakespeare, Bhavabhuti, Kalidasa’, in Bringing Modernity Home: Marathi Literary Theory in the Nineteenth Century (along with an Anthology), ed. Prachi Gurjarpadhye (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2014), 309–311. 93 Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Preface’, in Abhijnanashakuntalam: The Recognition of Shakuntala (Gurgaon: Penguin, 2016), xi.

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4 INCORPORATING ‘LOVE’: FROM SANSKRIT KAVYA TO MARATHI DRAMA Le poète jouit de cet incomparable privilège, qu’il peut à sa guise être lui-même et autrui. Comme ces âmes errantes qui cherchent un corps, il entre, quand il veut, dans le personnage de chacun. Pour lui seul, tout est vacant…. The Poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able, at will, to be himself and another. Like those wandering souls seeking a body, he enters, when he wants, into everyone’s character. For him alone, everything is empty .... —Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris1

Many competing texts and traditions comprise the epic corpus in South Asia—and the presence and contemporaneity of epic texts brook no comparison with other regions in the world. Neither singular nor entirely exclusive, versions of the epics proliferate anywhere there’s an occasion to retell them, and certainly at times on the ritual calendar. It comes as no surprise, given the kinds of episodes Bhave adapted for the stage, that Kirloskar too, similarly chose to adapt an episode from the Mahabharat for his next play. In Saṅgīt Saubhadra (1882), A Musical about Subhadrā, Kirloskar toyed with the story of Arjun’s marriage to Subhadra. Only this time, he expanded the epic text of his own accord. Unlike his translation of the Śakuntalā, which I spoke about in the previous chapter, Kirloskar did not translate a Sanskrit play this time around but reimagined the episode within his own milieu. And his sources for Saubhadra—two millennia of literary texts—parade through history only to be subsumed into the play, at once revealing and concealing middle-class, predominantly brahman, aspirations. Kirloskar’s play was a literary fiat, a formal authorisation from history’s hinterlands into his contemporary milieu. This chapter is about the transformation of a well-known epic story— about Arjun and Subhadra—into a definitive version of that story, accomplished via literary and performative incorporation, in ways akin to Bakhtin’s novelistic discourse. If English literature enabled first South Asia, and then the national space, to be represented and made legible, 158

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then how did vernacular literatures position and transform themselves during the 19th century? Working backwards from the 20th century, in which the Indian novel in English and the nation are intimately connected, some militantly (and correctly, I think) critique the casual ‘causality’ between the ‘first stirrings of nationalist sentiment as well as the emergence of a new artefact of the imagination—the novel’.2 That is, why must the early novel be subsumed by its later brethren as part of the nationalist movement? The 19th-century Marathi novel, for example, has been microscopically analysed for its reliance on kāvya and other poetic media, which resist the kind of teleological development central to both narrative realism and mapping characters, through their psychological development, onto the national space.3 A novel like Halbe’s Muktamala (1861), for example, has often been called fantasy (adbhutaramya), replete with heroines trapped in caves and daring escapes and disguises.4 In north India, people often regard dastāns as early influences on literary and novelistic prose, and some recent work examines the place of the qissa, both forms of epic, poetic romance—the latter with reference to vernacular ‘formations’ of colonial Punjab.5 All three examples point to a need to explore the transfer of literary knowledge and genres that may have impacted vernacular literary formations, beyond the novel in South Asia, and which may be more in tune with the social world, let alone the retrospectively determined ‘national’ space. This is particularly important given the transformations in print I spoke about in the second chapter. Refocusing our attention away from the novel enables us to see continuity, transfer and, importantly, transition more clearly than may be evident in the novel. In the previous chapter, I examined the affective pulls of Kirloskar’s translation of Kālidāsa’s Śakuntalā. As a vernacular production, the performance functioned as surrogation and melodrama, reintegrating princely and priestly castes through an affective and visual economy evident in the costume and patronage. In Marathi, Śakuntalā powerfully brought together brahmans and aristocrats for 19th-century audiences, symbolically reproducing and reaffirming forms of patronage and association that were stressed in the wake of colonialism. Śakuntalā projected these relations onto future aspirations and desires through the performance. But after Śakuntalā’s very first performance, the translator and playwright B.P. Kirloskar had plans for a different and more ‘contemporary’ play than was possible through a translation.6 The new play’s contents and concerns were more immediately from his own (vernacular) world and drawn from vernacular literary anthologies that enjoyed a steady publishing boom from the 1850s onwards (see Chapter 2). These anthologies most often reproduced kāvya, known

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as ‘Puranic Poetry’ (because it is about stories from the Puranas) and also as ‘epic poetry’ as M.G. Ranade mentions in his ‘Remarks on the Marathi Portion of the Catalogue of Printed Books’.7 From Marathi kāvya materials, and presumably also his caste background, Kirloskar knew many of the episodes that were contained within the anthologies. But they were ākhyānās—as I mentioned in the Introduction and Chapter 2. They were different in two crucial ways from dramatic texts, true also of the different ‘Śakuntalā’ poems I mentioned in the previous chapter. According to his biographer and troupe member, S.B. Mujumdar, the poetic-plays were ‘unfavourable’ or pratikūḷa to the characters in the play—and Mujumdar explains further what this means: parantu, kālidāsāne jyāpramāṇe śakuntalā ākhyānātīl kinvā bhavabhūtīne uttar rāmāyaṇātargat lahukuś ākhyānātīl purān prasiddha kathābhāg sodūn deūn anek kālpanīk prasanga va kālpanīk pātre ghālūn āpāplyā nāṭakāt rasavaicitrya ānle, tyācpramāṇe aṇṇasāhebānnī ‘arjun-subhadrā vivāha’ svatahācyā kalpanāsāmarthyāne pūrvokta kavincyā nāṭakpaddhatīvar racūn ‘saṅgīt saubhadra’ nāvāne prasiddha kele. …however, just as Kalidas dropped the Purana-story form of Śākuntalā-akhyān or Bhavabhuti of the Later Rāmāyaṇ’s Lava-Kuśa ākhyān, by adding many thoughtful events and thoughtful characters to make their plays full of various rasas, so too Kirloskar modified Arjun-Subhadrā Vivāha into Saṅgīt Saubhadra with the power of his own imagination.8

I pause here to reflect on the term ‘thoughtful’ or kālpanika—which can also be translated as ‘devised’, ‘imagined’, ‘fictitious’ and ‘ideal’. Etymologically, it comes from the Sanskrit root kḷp, which often relates to the ritual practice of doing, generating, shaping, fashioning.9 With the support of Bhavabhuti and Kalidas, Mujumdar’s meaning is unambiguous in this passage. Kirloskar’s dramatic writing expands kāvya, creating an imagined world with rounded characters who evince a great psychological depth, one that comes specifically through the creation of an internal psyche, normally associated with novelistic character development. Drawing upon classical models, Kirloskar refashioned the play-poems into something more substantial, giving characters a proportioned form, in ways very different from Bhave. It is precisely such a focus on character and literary transformation that brings my chapter into conversation with novelistic discourse, especially Bakhtinian notions of authorial discourse and into the contested terrain of what was the dominant genre of Marathi bourgeois affiliation.

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In this chapter, I recover the literary pre-history of Saṅgīt Saubhadra (1882), one of the most popular modern Marathi plays (perhaps even one of the most popular Indian plays, if one considers its popular longevity) and bring that prehistory to bear on the play itself. In doing so, I elaborate the mechanisms through which Kirloskar’s dramatic text subsumes its literary history of kāvya and povāḍā to create and project a totalising authorial discourse, bearing the hegemonic aspirations of the 19th-century bourgeoisie and concealing its own literary past. In describing such a discourse, I use Bakhtin’s distinction between narrative voice as the vehicle of an ideologeme and an authorial discourse, which artistically represents narrative voice(s) within the text.10 However, I am aware of Bakhtin’s limitations when it comes to the theatre—he is, unfortunately, not theoretically rigorous. The kinds of heteroglossia he describes in the novel form have always been present in drama—varying linguistic registers according to a character’s social station is common in ancient Indian dramatic traditions as well as contemporary ones, in addition to non-Indian traditions. I take the differentiation between narrative voicing and authorial discourse at the level of the poetic genre to make my argument. That is, Kirloskar incorporates various poetic genres into his text—especially kāvya and povāḍā. Cannibalising these prior poetic-performance genres in terms of diction, theme, associated emotional scripting and occasionally formal grammatical structure, Saṅgīt Saubhadra reveals itself as a heteroglossic text. Its body contains (both in the sense of ‘having within’ and ‘controlling and restraining’) and incorporates the prior literary-performative resonances from their disuniting and socially fragmenting tendencies.11 Placed within the larger social context, it is apparent that this play, in subsuming prior literary idioms creates a world fraught with tensions, but is also capable of containing those tensions. This fraught world of Saṅgīt Saubhadra is a politically expedient one too, and, as I argue towards the end of this chapter, it makes a new kind of politics possible, looking forward to the kinds of late 19th-century social debates over companionship and marriage. The genre of the saṅgīt nāṭak (music drama), more broadly, also raises some questions about connections between the novel and the nation form—questions to which I return in the conclusion. My argument proceeds in three stages. In the first two parts of this chapter, I write about the many ‘Subhadras’ from literary history: from the Mahabharat and the Bhāgvata Purāṇa (MBh and BP hereafter), while focusing on Marathi poetry of the 18th century—kāvya, an epic poem and also a povāḍā, a ballad genre purportedly reserved for larger-than-life historical personalities, but whose contents were far more diverse, as I mentioned in the first chapter. In describing how this

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story unravels, I chart the development of an epic, heroic, text and its emotional valences through its many iterations—and the incorporation of Subhadra’s voice into the narrative in the third part.12 In the third part of this chapter, I further describe how these texts are refigured into one text ‘about Subhadra’: even in its title, the latter formulation, Saṅgīt Saubhadra, relies on vowel gradation to make its contents known: the ‘u’ in Subhadra the character becomes ‘au’ in the title, serving to declare to a knowing audience that the play is ‘about Subhadra’. By adding such an ablative twist to the eponymous heroine’s name, the title carefully refocalises attention away from Arjun, the wedding and Subhadra’s abduction, and onto the heroine herself. In this latter formulation, Kirloskar’s play text and its performance are especially timely in the 19th century, immediately predating discourses about conjugality and love that were part of the ‘reform’-oriented projects of the emerging bourgeois intelligentsia.13

FROM SANSKRIT KĀVYA TO MARATHI DRAMA If we take the central message of Many Ramayanas (1992) seriously, then we realise that the epics were not works, but rather, entire literatures.14 ‘My suspicion is,’ suggests Sheldon Pollock of the Mahabharat, that when one conceived of a text like the Mahabharata as a whole, if one ever did, it was not a book but a whole body of literature from which specific characters, incidents, or scenes could be adduced from memory to illuminate questions in social life,15

through which the ‘quest of an ideal life’ can be pursued.16 One sees the epics broken down into episodic knowledges, with the specifics often divorced from the whole in order to grapple with complex social quandaries. The availability of epic texts and their malleability within a historical condition has always been an important facet of literary production in South Asia. Multiple, often competing versions of the same episode have existed contemporaneously, and the stories have been continuously and consciously adapted to suit specific sociopolitical ends.17 A.K. Ramanujan even suggested these narratives are not to be read as stages in history or historically, but rather as part of a ‘simultaneous order’ as I wrote in Chapter 2.18 The episode of Arjun’s marriage to Subhadra is one such episode whose many iterations are a fascinating case study in the evolution of the episode into one about conjugality and romantic love in the 19th century. For my purposes here, I take romantic love to be a combination of both sexual desire

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and emotional attachment, as well as an added notion of suitability and ‘appropriateness’—the sanction of the match by the prevalent social forces has always (and almost everywhere) been standard. Anybody who has ever been married should know. The general narrative of the episode is about the union of Arjun, the pre-eminent epic hero of the Mahabharat (MBh hereafter) and Subhadrā. Subhadrā is the younger sister of Krishna, a character who has come to have divine status. When the episode commences, Arjun has wandered for several months through forests as penance for accidentally interrupting the conjugal activities of his elder brother and their polyandrous wife Draupadi. (We later find out that Krishna has choreographed the interruption.) Subhadra is Arjun’s fourth wife along his expiatory journey, each from one of the cardinal limits of the physical geography of South Asia.19 But Subhadra is different and more consequential than the others: she is the sister of Krishna, whose friendship with Arjun is the defining relationship of the MBh.20 Moreover, in an epic where patriliny often fails, this union is also perhaps the most important for bringing the MBh, much later, to a suitable close: their grandson is the only one left to carry forth the royal lineage. By the end of the episode, Arjun and Subhadra are married, but in a peculiar way. In successive episodes from the MBh onwards, this outline transforms quite substantially, retaining only the basic rubrics—the initial moment of Arjun wandering in the forest and the conclusion: his marriage to Subhadra. Various elements gain an emphasis while others recede as the episode gains momentum and mass as it tumbles down the annals of literary history to become the fully-fledged psychological-‘realist’ smash-hit of Kirloskar’s Saṅgīt Saubhadra. In its fledgling, MBh form, the Arjun-Subhadra narrative is, unsurprisingly, short but full of details. I use it and the BP here for recuperating a telescopic, retrospective and contrasted meaning from later versions, rather than a situated, historical reading of its own. In the MBh, the episode takes place during a festival, when the Vṛṣṇīs (those of Krishna’s clan) are intoxicated, and Krishna and Arjun wander around together in a highly fraternal manner: …And while they were wandering there, they saw the handsome daughter of Vasudeva—Bhadra by name—decked in every ornament in the midst of her maids. And as soon as Arjun beheld her, he was possest [sic] by the god of desire. And, O Bharata, that tiger among men, Krishna, observing Partha contemplate her with an absorbed attention, said with smiles, ‘How is this? Can the heart of one that rangeth the woods be agitated by the god of desire? This is my sister, O Partha, and the uterine sister of Sarana. Blest be thou, her name is

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164 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Bhadra, and she is the favorite daughter of my father. Tell me if thy heart be fixed upon her, for I shall then speak to my father myself.’ Arjun answered, ‘She is Vasudeva’s daughter and Vāsudeva’s [Krishna’s] sister. Endued [sic] with so much beauty, whom can she not fascinate? If this thy sister, this maid of the Vrishni race, becometh my wife, truly may I win prosperity in everything! Tell me, O Janardana, why what means I may obtain her! I will achieve anything that is achievable by man, to obtain her!’ Vasudeva answered, ‘O thou bull amongst men, the s[v]ayamvara hath been ordained for the marriage of the Kshatriyas. But that is doubtful (in its consequences), O Partha, as we do not know this girl’s temper and disposition. In the case of K[]shatriyas that are brave, a forcible abduction for purposes of marriage is applauded, as the learned have said. Therefore, O Arjun, carry away this my beautiful sister by force, for who knows what she may do in a s[v]ayamvara?’ Then Krishna and Arjun, having thus settled about what should be done, sent some speedy messenger unto Yudhisthira at Indraprastha, informing him of everything. And the strong-armed Yudhisthira, as soon as he heard it, gave his assent to it.21

This passage contains the entirety of the Arjun–Subhadra matrimonial episode—minus the actual forced abduction that I discuss later with reference to another poem. Reading it over, its distance from the Kirloskar text is striking. Here, the episode has an abundance of language about emotional states (possession, desire, absorbed attention, smiling, favouritism, fixation, fascination, doubt, temper, disposition, bravery, applause) that is embedded within the epic narrative. At the same time, this abundance of emotional language also contrasts with the narrative economy of the entire episode—this is almost the entire episode. One thing is certain: the emotional language makes it abundantly interpretable. It says volumes about Arjun’s current status, his relationship with his elder brother as well as with Krishna, the latter’s relationship with his father as well as his sister. While we ‘hear’ from Arjun and Krishna, nowhere do we hear the heroine’s voice. Unlike its later iterations, especially the 18th- and 19th-century versions, this episode is not about vipralaṃbha (love in separation) and viraha (abandonment, separation, especially of lovers): Arjun neither recognises Subhadra nor has he ever met her. Indeed, he is a penitent ascetic (he ‘rangeth the woods’) and should not feel the pangs of desire at all as Krishna muses. Reading this passage, Subhadra’s choice in the matter (svayaṃvar) is also a hurdle. Krishna is unsure of Subhadra’s temperament and suspects she may not choose Arjun as a husband. Apparently, he too does not know Subhadra well, and it is precisely to

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avert her unpredictability that Krishna advises Arjun to abduct her, as is prescribed for heroic persons. The language also suggests a connection between heroism and attainment—Arjun wants to attain glory through her—and Subhadra as a fortune. But there is little here about an emotional bond that could be understood as love in any modern sense—and why should there be? Some of these elements are presented in the Bhāgvat Purāṇa (ca. 800–1000 ce; Canto 10.86), which contains an equally short account of the episode as the MBh. In the BP, the text mentions Subhadra’s engagement with Duryodhan, the chief antagonist in the MBh and paternal cousin of Arjun; it mentions Arjun’s desire for her and his resolution to pose as a holy mendicant in Dwarka, where he earns repute and veneration for his penances (10.86.3). None of these are explicitly part of the MBh episode, and the transformations between the MBh and the BP are nothing short of a hermeneutic feat: anger against Arjun after the abduction, and Balrām’s preference for Duryodhan in the context of the MBh more generally combine in the BP, an interpretation that has consequences for later versions of the story. In line with the MBh, Arjun abducts Subhadra during a religious festival, and the text only later mentions that he had obtained permission from her parents as well as Krishna. There is no mention of a svayaṃvar in the BP and prior acquaintance with Subhadra is implicit or not at all. They both are shown to be drawn to each other during a ritual feast when the women serve the men, but it is unclear if that is more than a purely physical attraction, and the narrative, read strictly, doesn’t indicate whether Subhadra knows that the person she serves is Arjun—he is disguised as a mendicant after all (10.86.6-7). These few changes seem to contain some development in an interpersonal romance, defined awkwardly through physical attraction. Both Arjun (in disguise) and Subhadra eye each other—presumably not for the first time, given Arjun’s previous desire for her—and both are taken by the other, even though it seems odd that Subhadra evinces desire for Arjun-in-disguise.22 The BP episode still leaves intact the haraṇa, or abduction, a problematic model for romantic love, given the significance of the quintessential abduction story Sītā-haraṇa—the episode of Sita’s abduction in the Ramayan— whose association with demonic proclivities is not insignificant. Finally, to bring the 19th-century context into these two versions of the same story—both svayaṃvar and haraṇ are practices (maybe) suitable for Kshatriyas, not necessarily other segments of the population, especially not populations vying for respectability. Both practices, svayaṃvar and haraṇ, illustrate an entirely different relationship to property, propriety, ‘individual’ choice, and love as desire or emotional attachment that seem alien to practices for a 19th-century audience.

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Arjun’s case is revealing. He has wandered in the woods for months and has also ‘married’ four other women during the same time. For him, yet another wife is not an issue of impropriety nor is abducting her. Rather, as Krishna notes, it would be worse were she presented to him as a bride, and Krishna explicitly mentions, in the MBh, that she is not an animal to be bought and sold: Partha knoweth that we of the Satwata race are never mercenary. The son of Pandu also regardeth a swayamvara as doubtful in its results. Who also would approve of accepting a bride in gift as if she were an animal? What man also is there on earth who would sell his offspring? I think Arjun seeing these faults in all the other methods took the maiden away by force, according to the ordinance. This alliance is very proper. Subhadra is a renowned girl. Partha too possesseth renown (my italics).23

In the passage above, Krishna addresses his elder brother Balrām, who is furious with Arjun, but quickly placated by these logical arguments in the MBh. Equally important here is the way the narrative establishes some rudimentary notion of conjugality: both Partha (Arjun) and Subhadra possess renown, and therefore it is ‘proper’: like should marry like and further, that the consequences of such a mutually appropriate union will culminate in something better, irrespective of Subhadra’s wishes and desires. Far from dilatory, the specifics of the epics were the very ground upon which 19th-century debates about conjugality rested, and while the ‘reformers’ were eager to speak about the svayaṃvar, the haraṇa rarely enters their discourse.24 Resignifying this story into its 19th-century shape that attempts to unite sexual desire, emotionality and social appropriateness thus requires teasing out and expanding many of the minor elements while removing some major ones. It requires a hermeneutic understanding both for the performers and audiences—especially since the residue of these alternative versions never entirely disappears. One needs (1) to erase the instability of personal choice while; (2) also ensuring that characters choose; (3) to rework the haraṇ genre; (4) to provide a context for their conjugality (how and where they met) and (5) to create a good plot with a suitably emotional conflict (being forced into marriage with someone else) with many twists (her escape from her initial matrimony) and more than a little humour and love (so that the audience is not bored). While the BP moves somewhat in the direction of answering these questions, what remains intact is the haraṇ; its emotional conflict also remains somewhat flat. The plot, too, has its problems: this episode instead establishes a new problem: it creates two sets of competing

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triangles with Subhadra as a common point between the two: Balrām– Duryodhan– (Subhadra) –Arjun–Krishna. If it were not apparent from the episode in the MBh, then the BP, despite the new focus on some kind of mutual attraction, creates a triangulation of homosocial desire (Krishna and Arjun or Balrām and Duryodhan) with Subhadra at its crux. Both cases also retain or cannot escape the political exigencies of bringing Arjun together with Subhadra: it cements the allegiance between Krishna and Yudhisthira in the frame of the larger epic. These are all things to bear in mind as we recede from this telescopic view and into the bulk of this chapter.

TWO HALVES MAKE A WHOLE Nearly all of the aforementioned thematic structures from the Bhāgavat Purāṇ remain present in Kirloskar’s most direct source for his play: the poet Moropant’s (1729–1794) Subhadrā-haraṇ-prakaraṇī or the Episode about the Abduction of Subhadra (SHP hereafter). Moropant was one of the most popular ‘Puranic’ poets mentioned by M.G. Ranade in his ‘Remarks’ along with a few others. Ranade mentions that he, ‘was not surprised to find that the largest contributor in point of quantity, and first in the order of poetic merit, is Moropant’.25 He writes further: ‘The Mahabharat and its episodes are the most popular subjects with the poets. Moropant has travelled over the whole of the Mahabharat story, and his Ramayanas, with their fantastic principles of arrangement, are a curiosity in literature.’26 Moropant had, in the course of his life, translated and performed the entire MBh. If the epics were not, or rarely ever, to be ‘known’ in their entirety, then Moropant was that theory’s foremost 18th-century proponent. He composed his poetry in the āryā metre—the Marathi equivalent of the Sanskrit gītī—and for Moropant, it was designed to be recited with accompanying music, much like a kīrtan.27 As performed, however, his poetry properly comprised of ākhyāns—known ‘whole’ stories—whose contents were drawn from episodes in earlier epic and puranic sources. To restate: it was ‘Puranic’ kāvya or ‘poetry’ as a literary genre, but the episodes drawn and performed as such were ākhyāns. These differences remain salient for 18th- and 19th-century audiences. Moropant’s ākhyān SHP was known to 19th-century audiences and readers through Parashuram Ballal Godbole’s (1799– 1874) Selections from the Marathi Poets which was first published in 1854, as I mentioned in the second chapter, but also because the religious calendar was structured around such epic episodes, which would have been part of a layperson’s cultural repertoire.

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Within such a cultural milieu, Moropant’s SHP reached Kirloskar’s eyes.28 Rather than read Moropant in a linear way—as part of the MBhBP tradition—I choose to read him against his contemporary Rām Jośī (1758–1812), who wrote a Povāḍā or heroic ballad titled Subhadrecā Povāḍā or Subhadra’s Povāḍā (SP hereafter). The two poets’ idioms (Moropant and Joshi’s) are distinct, but they even admired each other. Moropant apparently Sanskritised Joshi’s vocabulary when the two met in Baramati.29 At the same time, the pull looks bidirectional and we see similar vocabularies of love and longing, desire, heroism and disgust with Duryodhan in both poems. Moreover, these poems are unique in yet another way—while Moropant’s poem is in the poet’s voice and is an overtly masculine poem in its focus on heroism, intrigue, comedy and larger-than-life politics and proclamations, Joshi’s poem describes an intimate domestic world in which Subhadra converses with her sister-in-law. That is, while Moropant recreates some of the dynamics between characters in the MBh and BP, Joshi’s poem offers something quite different—Subhadra herself speaks. Given some of the farces I speak about in the fifth chapter and the historical evidence of temples as sites where women could gather, I speculate about the nature of men adopting a female voice and the spaces of these performances. At the same time, whether audiences for SP included women, still doesn’t change our ability to read Joshi’s SP against Moropant’s SHP, given that both bear more than some influence on Kirloskar’s play, or at least Kirloskar’s interpretations of the episode. Below, I will first demonstrate how SHP can be read as part of the MBh–BP lineage, but then move beyond that by reading it against SP, thereby reading SHP diachronically against literary history and also synchronically within its literary contexts. Unlike its predecessors, SHP at first seems to contain little to advance it beyond the kind of values evinced in the BP or the MBh, and it remains true to the former down to many of the intimate details. Most importantly, there is no mention of a svayaṃvar for Subhadra to choose her husband, for example, and any kind of mutual affection is an epiphenomenon of being appropriately matched in terms of caste and status. Instead, even more so than the BP, Moropant’s text seems to valorise Arjun’s epic feats rather than any kind of match between the two whose union became emblematic of late 19thcentury conjugality. Similarly, the only interaction between Subhadra and Arjun occurs when Arjun, dressed as a mendicant, conducts a ritual at Balrām’s behest. As they eat after the sacrifice, Subhadra pays especially careful attention to Arjun. It is unclear whether these attentions carry any knowledge of whom she is serving—indeed in Kirloskar’s play, as I write later, Subhadra is unaware that the ascetic is Arjun. Here too, while she pays special attention to him, he clearly ogles her; and such

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scenes drive much of the comic relief in Kirloskar’s Saubhadra—the comic arises from the erotic, so states the Natyashastra (Nāṭyaśāstra) and Kirloskar were undoubtedly aware of some of its conventions.30 As each of the aforementioned texts (MBh, BP and SHP) makes abundantly clear, this episode has little to do with Subhadra at all. The SHP, however, remains taught and tense—the difficultly of the text lies in the unclear relationship between the epic and episodic (a problem that needs to be theorised more carefully for South Asia more generally), and other contemporaneous traditions. While an episode within the larger epic, it is also ‘complete’ on its own though audiences would know the story as part of the epic. That is, the epic text, going back to the MBh, creates a universalising epistemology, a background from which various episodes can be drawn into the foreground. In the epic text, Subhadra is, for Arjun, yet another stop along his journey. This episode is about Arjun’s acquisition of various merits and alliances—weapons, knowledges and brides. Brides are prizes, ones that endear the winner to their erstwhile ‘owner’—they are politically serviceable even as Krishna’s speech above rejects this mercenary real politik. Arjun is a hero whose fame is growing—in the MBh, his arrival at Dwarka is celebrated with thousands of onlookers. He has found others to marry as well and each is a particularly important alliance in the ongoing MBh conflict as is Subhadra. And each of these activities thus fall under the idealisation of Arjun as an epic hero, not a faithful lover, husband or something suitably ‘modern’—he isn’t a ‘family man’ in the words of one critic.31 He is, however, a ‘devotee’ of Krishna, a relation that defines Moropant’s SHP and the MBh before it.32 As part of an epic, certain structures enable and portend towards specific outcomes. But this does not mean that the path from one to the next need be, as a result of the structure, a specific one. That is, there is plenty of room for the narrative to wander between two points on a narrative. Indeed, we only learn towards the end of the MBh why the Arjun–Subhadra union is one of the most important: the union’s offspring ensures continuity in the lineage of the MBh. Without it, the entire 18-day battle would be for nought. Moropant’s SHP seems to bank too heavily towards reproducing its literary history until we read SP. SHP begins:33 Tithe hiṇḍat gelā dharmānuj arjun prabhāsālā Āpta-mukhe nija-mātuḷa-kuḷa-vṛttāntāsi aiktā jhālā

(1)

Kṛṣṇānujā subhadrā lagnālā yogya jāhlī āhe tīte sva-mate hal-dhar34 dhṛtarāṣtra-sutāsi-dyāvayā-pāhe(2) tātādik-mhaṇati-manī su-mati khaḷālā a-cakśulā ratna śūdrās śruti deto rām, na cāleci yāpudhe yatna

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(3)

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170 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India nija-sukha-siddhi subhadrā sādhāyā hoīn tridaṇḍi yatī priya tīhūni nase maja; tī kī hī ritī gati, aho niyatī

(5)

Translation: Wandering there, the brother of Dharma, Arjun, went to Prabhāsa35 Having heard the story of his maternal family from a relative  (1) that the sister of Krishna, Subhadra, has become fit for marriage.36 And Balrām, acting alone, will give Subhadra to the son of Dhritarashtra.37  (2) In his mind, Arjun quickly said to himself, ‘to a vile person, an uncorrupted jewel?38 Krishna gives ear to Śudras, such schemes won’t fool him... (3) … …to obtain Subhadra, the fruit of my happiness, I will become a tridandi yati,39 if not my [fate] to hers; either she or, this state of exile for me. (5)

As with the BP above, these opening verses immediately establish two sets of triangles: Balrām–Duryodhan– (Subhadra) –Krishna–Arjun. Subhadra isn’t simply a contest between the former and the latter pairs, but her presence speaks to a kind of triangulation of male desire, whereby masculine and homo-social energies are re-routed through female intermediaries. These energies are the political and religious ideologies underlying the status of Krishna as a divine figure and the narrative trajectories that unite the Vrinshi clan with the Pandavas within the context of the MBh. Will Krishna and Arjun define the MBh, or Balrām and Duryodhan? The setup, therefore, continues the older tradition from the BP. Arjun, at this point, has not seen Subhadra—she is ‘a-cakśulā’ literally ‘unseen’ though idiomatically ‘uncorrupted’ (verse 3). The slippage between the literal and idiomatic meanings of ‘a-cakśulā’ is quite significant here and points to an impossible requirement for this episode to be one about conjugality, especially for a 19th-century society. Women and men lived separate lives, and if strangers and men outside a woman’s immediate and (sometimes) extended family can never meet, then how can one form emotional ties before marriage? Indeed, all bets before marriage point towards physical attraction, social compatibility or ‘appropriateness’. The preconditions of romance, companionship and conjugality require something largely not present in the 19th century: free association between sexes. In this regard, the

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problems of conjugality were hardly limited to South Asia; how many ‘respectable’ folks were happy when their sons and daughters married outside their own station?—I would wager far fewer than we think. Why else are there so many long-lost rich relatives at the ends of plays and novels from the 18th and 19th centuries, if not to avert inter-class marriages? Relatives who often make their fortunes in the colonies, no less! Property, propriety and appropriateness were always reasons for marriage, elsewhere as in South Asia. Framing structures of property and appropriateness only bracket the narrative—giving it a beginning and an end—but what happens between is the emotional plot. The MBh’s narrative requires them to be eventually married, so why not make it a happy and willing marriage? Why leave it as the straightforward encounter of the MBh? The relation between the epic and the episode is thus already an expansionist one, one that tends towards emotional complexity. Moropant’s text maintains a tension between suitability and emotional attachment, as it is pulled in one direction by the epic and another by the incipient romance of the BP. It contains more than a sufficient amount of poetic support for Arjun and Subhadra’s conjugal appropriateness—and ‘appropriateness’ here appears as a synonym for willingness and mutual affection. In verses 1.1 and 2.1, for example, the text compares the two of them through their status as younger siblings ‘anuja/ā’—a term that loses both its birth order and gender inflexion in translation. Moropant also underlines their appropriateness for each other through the juxtaposition of Arjun as the younger brother of Dharma,40 Justice himself, and Subhadra as the younger sister of Krishna, the divine incarnation of Vishnu. Who could be more knowing of the (religious) law than Dharma?41 In subtle ways, the permission granted by Yudhisthira (in the version of the episode from the MBh) thus trickles into Moropant’s SHP, and the details in the narrative establish the two not as a conjugal but a ‘suitable’ pair based on their birth order and ability to bring together Krishna and Yudhisthira (the religious figure and the figurehead of dharma) at the expense of Balrām and Duryodhan. Of course, this suitability is also political, and political exigencies also contribute to their match—Subhadra endears Arjun to Krishna. Their friendship is one of the most important in the Mahabharat— one marked by ‘shared emotions’ rather than mechanical fealty and vassalage.42 Arjun’s abduction of Subhadra is a case in point, and Moropant’s poem most emphatically demonstrates how quintessential Arjun’s status as an epic hero is; the need to form alliances frames this entire episode, even though it may not be immediately apparent in the text43:

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172 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Nara-haya-ratha-gaja śibikārudha sakaḷa vṛṣṇi-dāra-jana cāle Jhāle siddha varhaḍi taise yadu-bhaṭa; dharā baḷe hale

(20)

Divya-rathāta subhadrā baisuni seneta tedhavāṁ śobhe Yanmukha-sudhākare nara-vara-pārthāśaya-payonidhi-śobhe  (21) Tevhāṃ dhāvuni baise pārth subhadrā-rathīṃ jasā pāṭīṃ Su-cira-kśudhit brāhmaṇ hāṁ hāṁ mhaṇtāhi vāḍhilyā tāṭī(22) Samaya-dña catur sevak dhanu tūṇ taśāt deti āṇonī Dhāvati rakśak sainik kapaṭ-yati-kṛtātyanartha jāṇonī(23) Tyāteṁ mhaṇe subhadrā-muktā-har vīr arjun marāl Samara lakśahi yā pari kāk tumhī gati visarjun marāl

(24)

Dharmānuj mī arjun siṁha, tumhī śaś-kiśor, āṭopā Yā ṭopā kavacācyā bhīmā-valgā ugeci āṭopā(25) Aise nīṭ daṭāvuni jāy subhadrā harūni to pārtha Māriti hākā kevaḷ nāgvilā vani jasā vaṇik-sārtha(26) Sārthak pārtha karī, te kairviṇī to sudhāṁśu to gauravitā Savitā bisinīsi varī kīṁ bhete to guṇadña tī kavitā

(27)

Śruti satkriya dharm-pathā śobhavitī dampatī tase svarthā Anyonya-priya saṅgam to premaḷ bhakta mukunda-kathā

(28)

Jhaṭiti bhaṭ-kaṭak bahu kari kanya nelī mhṇoni bobhāṭ Vāṭe baḷāsi saṅge jo jo tyā dasyucāci to bhāṭ(29) Prasphurdhar-dal prabhu balbhadra mhane khareci sāṅgā re Koṭheṁ to kapaṭ-paṭū gāṭhitase jo paṭāt āṅgāre(30) Koṭheṁ rath, musaḷ pure, kavac kaśālā, dhanuṣya rāhoṁ dyā Vatselā nija-dharṣaṇa-kara-khaḷa-daṇdotsavāsi pāhoṁ dyā

(31)

Translation: Men, chariots, elephants, mounted palanquins, the women, all departed They became pure as their Yadu-ancestors; as Balrām was held captive,  (20)

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Being then seated in a splendid chariot in the midst of the army suited Subhadra Just as Subhadra was suitable for the eminent Partha’s attention (21) Then, as the long-fasted brahmans were seated and served Partha charged and brought Subhadra into his own chariot 

(22)

Immediately, squires brought bows and quivers there to the feast  And soldiers ran to save [her] from that false ascetic’s vile hostilities (23) To them, Pearl-like Subhadra’s courageous abductor said, ‘You’ll die ‘Even if one thousand come to fight, you’ll die, and give your bodies to the crows  (24) ‘Brother of Yudshithira I, Arjun the Lion, you’re just rabbits, so caution! Under this guise44, the fearful horse’s bridles buckle, so caution!’45 (25) Saying these threatening words, Arjun abducted Subhadra and left; They could only scream, as a plundered merchant robbed of his train (26) [Then] Partha completed his feat, the lotus beauty and he, under the sun’s  immortal rays were wed so that his qualities and her beauty could meet(27) As the path of righteousness is adorned by honour, so Subhadra adorned his chariot Mutually joined in love, he the adoring devotee, and she, the salvation46  (28) Immediately, the holy and the host47, in an uproar, bellowed, ‘[he] took our girl!’ But while relating all to Balrām, their admiration for Arjuna was unmistakable.48  (29) The honourable Balrām, trembling with rage, bellowed, ‘Tell me the truth! Where is that false prophet [covered] with ashes in his folds and knots?  (30)

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174 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India ‘Where’s my chariot? My club’s enough—why armour? Leave the bow!49 See how I take pleasure in punishing my dear Subhadra’s abductor!’ (31)

The key moments in these lines (22–26; 29–31) demonstrate something more turgid than the delicacy of mutual affection. Contrasted with verses 21, 27 and 28, the poem betrays two compatible but distinct sensibilities—neither of which are entirely about mutual affection, or rather, about mutual affection between Arjun and Subhadra. On the one hand, Arjun’s actions are suitable for an especially celebrated Kśatriya. His prowess is unrivalled and even his enemies are in awe— quite an amusing moment (25). These are set against the language of suitability, mutuality, union and love in verses 17, 23 and 24. Within the poem’s historical contexts—literary lineage from the BP as well as Arjun’s religious and ‘political’ sensibilities—the language of union, devotion and salvation are quite consistent with Krishna-centred religious practices. Here, in this poem, Subhadra endears Arjun to Krishna, and Arjun becomes a better bhakta through Subhadra. She is his ‘mukunda-kathā’, literally, ‘Krishna-story’. ‘Mukunda’ is an epithet for Krishna, and in this phrasing, it is unclear what the import of such an adjective signifies for their marriage. Is this marriage about her or is it about Krishna and Arjun? Is he a ‘premaḷa bhakta’, literally ‘affectionate’ or ‘love-filled’ devotee devoted to her or Krishna? But his bhakti is political as well and his actions essentially guarantee Balrām’s neutrality some years later when wars come to pass. Thus, the language of love and suitability remain at odds with the religious and politically efficacious tenor of the episode. As given here, the path to conjugality (for Kirloskar) involved re-writing deep narratives about an episode whose actual values are quite ambiguous—neither entirely about sustaining Subhadra’s choice nor about actual conjugality—but rather covertly ‘about’ sealing the bond between Arjun and Krishna. Indeed, even at the end of the MBh, Subhadra returns to Dwarka with Krishna! It seems that Moropant’s own narrative, given the lack of emotional development, also arcs towards such a mercenary end. Without Subhadra’s own voice within the narrative, both Balrām and Duryodhan become explanatory ciphers, whose addition to the story (in the BP and SHP) may be seen, in one interpretation, as the cause behind Arjun’s abduction of Subhadra. That is, by abducting her, the relation between Balrām and Duryodhan remains a weak one— and indeed Balrām personally remains neutral in the final war in the MBh. But in adding both Balrām and Duryodhan to the episode in order to create a conflict (the MBh has no real emotional conflict), the

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later versions also create and enable an entanglement of ambiguously directed affection (perhaps religious) and the beginnings of a conjugal plot, albeit undercut by the epic politics. The emotional tenor of the episode relies on the way in which Arjun and Subhadra don’t want to see Subhadra married off elsewhere: an affection expressed against rather than one expressed for. Read alone, SHP thus seems too much akin to its earlier prototypes with few surfaces containing an emerging conjugality that could have been appealing to project into the public sphere for 19thcentury audiences. If emotion comes into the purview, it is about the appropriateness of each for the other, buffeted by their familial ties, with emotion remaining caught between religious, epic political and conjugal overtones. The former two, religious and political, legitimise the later, conjugal. Even the idea of any prior history of their relationship remains ambiguous in the term ‘a-cakśulā’ as I mentioned above. Within the 18th-century context, however, and read alongside SP, SHP is an entirely different poem. Together, the two combine to express the masculine and feminine sensibilities of the episode in ways inaccessible—or unavailable in the earlier iterations. As I mentioned above, Moropant and Rām Jośī both knew of each other and had also met, with the former influencing the latter to abandon his tamāśā (a kind of folk theatre on secular themes) in favour of kīrtan, a more respectable kind of performance usually about the exposition of a religious theme.50 Rām Jośī was one of the many famous itinerant bards of Maharashtra known as śāhīrs. While a brahman by caste, Rām Jośī’s oeuvre is marked by a distinctly colloquial sensibility—he eschewed the epic poetical style and vocabulary of his contemporary Moropant and wrote instead lāvaṇīs and povāḍās, two kinds of folk ballads that generically emerge during the 16th century, some of which I analysed in the first chapter.51 Like Moropant, Rām Jośī’s poetry was also published in collections from the 1850s onwards. Rām Jośī's Subhadrecā Povāḍā or ‘Subhadra’s Povāḍā’ is particularly unique and worth pondering in light of the way Kirloskar’s playtext expands Subhadra’s own role and articulates female desire. SP also attests to the fact that the two—Arjun and Subhadra— were seen as a conjugal pair, at least in the century before the 19th, and seen alongside SHP, raises some interesting questions about audiences and various ‘conjugal’ inflexions. Rām Jośī’s Subhadrecā Povāḍā by its title indicates that its protagonist is Subhadra—not Arjun. She does not heroically lead anybody into battle, nor is she passively abducted. The poet’s and the speaker’s voices are not the same, nor is there an omniscient narrator. The main speaker in SP, Subhadra herself, addresses a female relative in the poem. Here, I will draw out the main elements of the povāḍā that make it relevant

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and different from the other ‘Subhadra’ texts. These elements include its supposed audience, its voicing, its formal performative elements and its specific details. A brief overview: the povāḍā is broken into four stanzas, each of nine lines. The first eight lines of the first stanza end on an ‘e’ whereas the remaining lines (in the entire povāḍā) end on ‘ā’. The first stanza contains a critique of parental authority, failure of the family structure and also snide remarks about Duryodhan; in the second and third stanzas, we see Subhadra experiencing and expressing love-in-separation (vipralambha and viraha) from Arjun as a virahiṇī (woman-in-longing); we read of Arjun’s whereabouts and her emotional resolutions. In the final stanza, she relates a portentous dream before the poet concludes with his own portent that Subhadra will have her way. I have provided a full translation of the povāḍā below the transliteration: Māybāpācā śrīkṛṣṇācā vicar moḍuni baḷideve1 Durāgrahāneṁ niścay kelā suyodhanālā maja dyāve 2 Bhāu navhe ga bāī bāuc kevaḷ bhāuni manāt  3 Vaḍil bandhu pari aḍil khoḍkar khaḷākaḍil he samjāve 4 Haṁsā ṭākuni kāy vāyasā muktāphaḷ he apārve 5 Brāhmaṇ ḍhakluni cāṇḍāḷālā kā mhaṇ jeū ghālāve? 6 Janmātaricā vairī bhāū aśā varuni he vaḷkhāve7 Apāy yālā upāy na suce kāy karāve viṣ khāve 8 Duryodhan khaḷ malā gelā ulthoni to poṭbharā9 Bhāūjīcā nirop gheūni gelā tithe hiṇḍpirā10 Koṇī jāgā na kaḷe āhe jāgā kiṁvā nijasurā 11 Taḍī tāpaḍī kiṁvā bhāpḍi houni gelā kāśipurā 12 Āviḍneṁ kī kāvaḍi nelyā śetubandha rāmeśvarā 13 Gaṅgā yamunā tapatī tuṇgā kṛṣṇā revā haridvarā 14 Yāñcyā puline ramya sādhucyā maṇḍaḷimadhe asal kharā 15 Kāṭak bāī karnāṭak vyañkaṭpati pāhuni karvīrā 16 Paṇḍharpur bhūvaikuṇṭhālā ālā harijan moherā 17 Puṇdalikāne kān phuṅkilā kelā celā sant purā 18 Kiṁvā amrādhīśe nelā amrāvatilā nijakumrā Tilottamā, urvaśī, menkā raṁbhādika jyā surāpsarā Aslā sundar ṭhaslā + salā bhulvuni nelā tyānni gharā Ruslā baslā ghuslā jāuni phaslā tetheṁ kharākhurā Athvā jhālā asel sādhū śodhuni sagḷī vasundharā Prāṇādhik to āṇā ghāluni āṇāvā var pārth hirā Arjun gheūni kaśās koṇā garjun maja bhay nāhi jarā Arjun varjun deha visarjun vāṭe majalā mṛtyu barā To bairāgī mī bairāgiṇ houni jāin digantarā

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

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Incorporating ‘Love’ Bahar navaticā kahar karitase lahar āli bāī dharā dharā Paḷpaḷ yugasam vāṭe Anubhav pahilā vahinī manīṁ smarā Kāl rātri myāṁ svapna dekhile jaṇū pūjite gauriharā Gaurav karuna gaurīne hā prasad didhalā hār turā Kaurav patilā raurav hoīl bole aisī divya girā Jāil bail karunī yeil tī tujalā ṭhik nar navrā Yatī navhe yā varunī gamto pati arjunjīcā ceharā Khuṇā pāhtā uṇā nase tiḷ koṇā saṅgun tumhi horā Śubh cinhe hī dehī sāṅgti kavirāyācā ṭhik horā

177 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Against the wishes of parents and Krishna, Balrām 1 Under a bad influence, has determined to give me to ‘Su’yodhan. 2 Not brothers, lady, but bothers; brothers should understand, 3 Fathers, family, they should understand Duryodhan’s mischief. 4 Discarding the swan, shall I offer these pearls to a crow? 5 Abandoning the brahman, shall I serve food to the Reaper?526 He’s an evil brother incarnate, whom they should recognise. 7 For this misfortune, I have no remedy—what should I do, eat poison? 8 Duryodhan, wicked, left after abusing me, that glutton!539 Taking Krishna’s news, he went wandering like a pir.5410 Who knows where, whether awake or just wakeful? 11 Becoming a religious mendicant, he went to Kāśī,5512 And either happily or with holy water to Rāmeśvar’s stone bridge.5613 Gangā, Yamunā, Tapati, Tungā, Kṛṣṇā, Revā, Harīdvarā5714 He must be among the sādhūs on these pleasant riverbanks.  15 He has seen the hardy Karnāṭak, lady, and Vyankaṭeś, and Kolhāpūr.5816 He came to Pandharpūr, heaven on earth, and the home of devotees,5917 In the city of saints, Pundalīk, creator of the tradition, whispered in his ear!6018 Or maybe Lord Indra took his own son to Amraoti,6119 To Tilottamā, Urvaśī, Menakā, Rāṃbhā and other heavenly nymphs.  20 Captivated by their beauty, did he forget all—did they take him home? 21 Is he upset, confused, or engaged and cheated—truly? 22 Or he may have become a sādhū, having searched the entire earth, 23

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178 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Swear to fetch my husband, Pārtha the diamond, more valuable than life! 24 With Arjun at my side, no abuse can cause me even the slightest fear,25 Without Arjun, I put off this body, and feel death is better for me.26 Becoming ascetics, he and I will wander to the ends of the earth.  27 Lady, it is the season, the fullness of youth infects and drenches me, dharā-dharā.6228 Each moment seems an age; sister, please remember your first experience!6329 Last night I saw dreams, people were worshipping Gauri6430 After honouring her, Gauri gave me these favours—a garland and a plume, 31 ‘May the Kaurava groom go to hell’—so said the glorious One. 32 Gauri, wandering and returning, will give you a good man, a husband.6533 From this, understand that [you’ll see] not the Yati’s but Arjun-jis face; 34 There’s not even an iota of difference. Who tells you this prophecy?35 These good signs and thoughts tell the Poet's prophecy! 36

From the beginning of the poem, until the poet intervenes in line 33, Subhadra directs her complaints to her sister-in-law—whether Balrām’s wife (Revati) or Krishna’s wife (Rukmini) is unclear. This explains the repeated use of ‘bāī’ or ‘lady’ in lines 3, 16 and 28, and ‘vahinī’ or ‘sister-in-law’ in line 29. The reasons for such an address are clear: the first stanza is an uncompromising invective against kith and kin, which is mapped onto animality as well as caste. She begins with an implicit critique of the way family has not provided her with a suitable suitor—her brothers are apathetic and do not understand her feelings. And because they have failed to empathise, the family has become a shelter for outsiders, losing its protective status for those less empowered outside the domestic sphere. Here, much like in Kirloskar’s Saṅgīt Saubhadra, matrimonial decisions require negotiation between various family members. Authority figures should not be as absolute in their proclamations as Balrām, in this case—and even Moropant’s SHP emphasises this point (see SHP verse 2). Mother, Father and Krishna, in addition to the bride herself are connected through emotional ties and brotherhood, certainly to Subhadra, is defined by the brother’s ability to empathise with her and thereafter take her preferences into account.

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The logic of Duryodhan as a crow, a Candāḷ or ‘reaper’, generally a term of abuse signifying disgust, but used to refer to the Mahars and Mangs (communities considered untouchable during the time) and a corpse, parallels the swan (haṃsa) and brahman. Crows are traditionally liminal animals, both prophetic and associated with funerary rites conducted after the cremation, with the power to see beyond life and into death. Because crows are necessary for funerary rites, occupying a precarious position in relation to death, flesh, rot and disgust, animality and caste map onto pejorative, colloquial usages. What place would she (Subhadra), as a pearl, find beside such a one? Why throw pearls before crows?—a statement echoing SHP’s similar sentiment in verse 3: ‘to a vile person, an uncorrupted jewel?’ And at the same time, in asking this question, Subhadra interjects her narrative and expresses her deep antipathy towards Duryodhan, who, like SHP, is a khaḷā or nuisance. This moment also parallels Arjun’s question from verse 3 in SHP—they both add their voices with very similar expressions. These moments, evaluating family and Duryodhan, establish Subhadra and Arjun together as a feeling couple, invested in each other. The second stanza of SP transitions to Arjun, and even though we do not hear his name until line 24, the travels describe Arjun’s immediate relevance to audiences. They build some anticipation, even though most would have known the story, suspending the identity of her true love until we hear his name. The second stanza tells of Arjun’s travels and his guise as a mendicant. Many of the locations appear overdetermined at first—Ganga and Yamuna are legendary as well as real—and others in the MBh also follow his route.66 But the travels also embrace intimate geography. Arjun is beckoned by Pundalik to come to Pandharpur and also to Karnatak. These two locations locate Arjun within the devotional landscape of the western Deccan. As in other texts analysed throughout this book, the city of saints Pandharpur is an indispensable part of the western Deccan imaginary. Arjun’s romp around such locations makes this story immediately resonant to Vārkarī ears and others of the bhakti persuasion.67 This also makes the text more colloquial. Against the grandiose theoretical bhakti of Arjun for Krishna in SHP, the SP text identifies practices and particularly non-brahmanical ones. The rivers mentioned in the poem, meanwhile, follow a north-south itinerary (Ganga to Tunga) and then a southnorth itinerary (Krishna to Haridvara), thus indicating a near-complete cycle, from one place to an extremity, and then back again. Far from the trappings of a distant epic, Arjun’s travels appear as a lover who is ever immanent and returning, much like the poet himself: these travels also describe the poet’s itinerary around the Deccan. While Arjun acquires knowledge, weapons and brides through travel, the poet who speaks

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about women, presumably for women, also enables a pre-condition of poetry: love-in-separation, vipralaṃbha and viraha. Women await the poet’s return as Subhadra awaits Arjun’s. The epic hero and the poet, thus, are one and the same. Before, the only antidote to a marriage with Duryodhan was poison (viṣa). Yet now, there are a different set of possibilities—three to be exact. A life with Arjun vanquishes all fears; without him, death; but a third possibility—social death with him. Arjun and Subhadra can become ascetics (bairāgi, bairāgiṇ). In this third possibility, Joshi’s text also echoes Moropant’s, in which Arjun suggests he may remain a yati if he is unable to ‘obtain’ Subhadra. Finally, the fourth stanza adopts an altogether different voice, switching to a more sumptuous, erotic mood. It relies on the imagery of monsoons, longing and desire—’Lady, it is the season, the fullness of youth infects me, it drenches me, dharā-dharā’—and each moment is an age to one experiencing such passions. Of course, this is a trope, and one reads this in other poets as well. Honaji Bala (1754–1844), for example, writes ‘bahara navatīcā ranga’ or the ‘color of the fullness of youth’.68 These images of youth are not specific to western India, to the povāḍā genre, but are known tropes in various South Asian literatures.69 Importantly, by invoking such tropes, Subhadra adopts a universal voice, one that is at once her own and eminently general. That is, she appeals to past canonical heroines and literary figures who have also felt the pangs of separation and desire to support her claims. She is both unique and substantiated by a vast canonical literature. And her dreams, populated by divine figures—Gauri and Shiva—only reinforce her undreamt desires, adding credence and legitimacy to her emotionality. She uses literature as a way to know herself and the world around her, expressing only what is permitted in her own (literary–historical) past. Beyond themes, the povāḍā is structured to be received aurally— and it is hard to recreate the alliterative qualities in the translation; enjambment too makes reading more difficult than listening to it. For example, the opening line of the fourth stanza reads (in translation): Lady, it is the season, the fullness of youth infects me, it drenches me, dharā-dharā. For the original Marathi, I have italicised the internal rhyme as well as provided the scansion: bahara/navaticā/kahara/karitase/lahara/āli/bāi/dharā/dharā u u u /u u u - / u u u /u u u - /u u u /- u/- u / u - / u -

While the povāḍā does not contain a regular metre, its internal rhyme and metrical attributes are crafted in a sophisticated manner, linking onomatopoeisis to its formal metrical elements, in addition to its

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thematic ones. We see these overlapping poetics in the rhyme and metre in the first 17 syllables—the words ‘bahara navaticā kahara karitase lahara’ form the first unit of meaning, whose consequences reach the climactic conclusion through a break in the metre and rhyme. The final eight syllables too contain their own metrical inversion between ‘āli bāi’ (the first syllable in each word is heavy) and ‘dharā dharā’ (the second syllable is the heavy one). The poem abounds in such moments in which the form and content converge for a perfectly performative effect—such as in the naming of the rivers, which we need not translate to demonstrate its original rhythm and cadence, given that proper names cannot be translated (at least not from Indian into non-Indian languages): Gaṅgā / Yamunā / Tapatī / Tuṅgā / Kṛṣṇā / Revā / Haridvarā -- /uu/uu- /-/-/-- /u-u-

Here too the metre, consonance and internal rhyme collude to take us on a return trip along the north–south axis of India as mentioned earlier. Moreover, the caesura comes right after the first movement from north to south and is punctuated by the internal rhyme of the sounds ‘ṅ-gā’. The Gaṅgā and Tuṅgā (- -) bracket the Yamunā and Tapatī (u u -). This creates a light-footedness to the passage south, while the passage north is heavy and slow, only quickened by its imminent end: Haridvarā (u - u -). In so many ways such as these, the poem remains a text to be received aurally, sung in performance and most likely accompanied by music. Moropant himself refused to watch Rām Jośī, aware of the latter’s ‘corrupting’ acting but chose to remain hidden in order to listen to the performance.70 Performance also prompts one more important question of Subhadrecā Povāḍā. It is the only text in which Subhadra’s voice is the primary voice throughout the text, and her address is to another woman. The texts of the MBh, the BP and Moropant’s epic poem SHP contain little about Subhadra’s own wishes to make this particular union a conjugal one, and none of them is told in a female voice, to (internally) female listeners. That is, neither in the enunciation nor the reception, is the subject of discourse female. And while Subhadra’s own voice too is split between regional and universal overtones—as the various locations and devotional practices indicate—it is nonetheless a clear articulation of filial expectations, the avenues for seeking fulfilment of expectations and preference of her own choices over those of her brother’s. Thus, while its narrative contours are akin to several other versions (Subhadra must wed Arjun), its politics and religion, in practice, are not. In Bakhtinian terms, the poem creates a different poetic space through

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its alternative narrative voice: in its hollows, we hear the echoes of a different ideologeme. Not only does Subhadra’s voice dominate the narrative but her address is also to other women. Her diction indicates as much: both at the beginning of the poem and in the fourth stanza, she casually says ‘ga bāī’ and ‘āli bāi’. In these two colloquial expressions, the latter term means ‘lady’ while the former term modifies the first expression in an emphatic way (‘āli’ is a verb in agreement with lahara: the wave is coming). While one may say ‘ga bāī’ as a man, it would never be used to address a man.71 In some ways, the mechanics of this poem are similar to those of rekhti poetry, a genre of ghazal in which the speakers are women, even though the poets are men. Here, Subhadra speaks and pleads with one of her sisters-in-law: Balrāma or Krishna’s wife. She asks her sister-inlaw to empathise by remembering her first love. While it is unclear whether the sister-in-law sympathises with Subhadra, it is obvious that this conversation is meant as a plea for her to intercede on Subhadra’s behalf: Subhadra is trying to convince her of the ways in which filial ties should operate and how women should empathise with each other. These are not, of course, to be taken as evidence of the world outside the poem, but I want to entertain the notion that they could be, in this case. Drag—men dressed as and performing women—can be quite conservative because of the way it reproduces the most retrograde stereotypes of gender. So too within South Asia, as has been argued about rekhti, where male poets create and employ a feminine persona, often as a male fantasy of women’s lives.72 This poem, however, is quite different from rekhti too. Since I addressed lāvaṇī and povāḍā more generally in the first chapter, here, I have limited my argument to the aforementioned poem and Rām Jośī more generally. As I mentioned earlier, Joshi was not a court poet, and he performed mostly in public places—in squares, at crossroads, adjacent temples, etc. These venues were not secluded venues with limited access. At best, his audiences would have included many women—most likely seated apart from the men (see Chapter 3 about audiences). At worst, they would have been predominantly masculine. Neither of these possibilities, however, detracts from the sincere tone of the poem—it is not meant to mock Subhadra (as rekhti adopts a pernicious attitude towards women) but rather to express her emotional condition sincerely. For both male and female audiences, the ‘message’ is rather clear—that family ought to be more attentive to the needs of the bride-to-be and at this basic level, the povāḍā remains decidedly partisan, on Subhadra’s side. Taken in tandem, SHP and SP are an interesting couple, and both seem to address different audiences, while also evidencing some direct

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mutual influence. The most obvious difference between the two is their voicing and style. SHP is a narrative epic poem, barely longer than its predecessors in the MBh and BP. It is composed in a highly formal Sanskritised idiom and Moropant carefully stitches together words via sandhi conventions drawn from Sanskrit. Over the many editions of Godbole’s Selections of the Marathi Poets, the largest editorial decision that makes Moropant’s texts literary for a reading audience is the decision to break the sandhi (see Chapter 2). But Moropant also crafts his diction in Sanskrit ways, such as in verse 8, when he refers to citizens—the inhabitants of a city—as paurāṁsi, an abstract noun derived (through vowel gradation of u to au) from the word pura, meaning ‘city’. These flourishes showcase his erudition and also adherence to the orthodoxy of Sanskrit knowledges—he was even related by marriage to the Peshwas.73 The narrator in the poem is the poet himself, one from an orthodox background or omniscient: the poem is narrated in the third person. The rhetorical flourishes, attention to specific times during the calendrical year, such as caturmāsa, the beginning of the monsoons and period of many major festivals (verse 7), suggest a more educated audience, and perhaps one more familiar with Sanskrit knowledge. Indeed, even the focus almost entirely on the men further reinforces this interpretation. It is difficult to imagine a text more different than Rām Jośī’s SP, whose narrative voice is in the first person, and whose social imagination is limited to the family, of distant lands with ascetics and dreams. There is no ‘city’ in SP and Subhadra is not aware of the larger political machinations afoot. She speaks directly to a woman in the poem and the poet adopts a feminine voice, presumably before a female audience—much like the buvā in Women Enchanted by a Story that I discuss in Chapter 5. To convey the emotionality of the situation, Joshi’s poem is replete with alliteration, metrical play, rhyme—multiple ‘sonic surfaces’ that resonate throughout the poem to emphasise its emotionality.74 Read in tandem, Subhadra’s voice here questions the legitimacy of SHP’s poetic voice and indeed its omniscience. It delimits a domestic sphere of activity that is not accessible to Moropant’s masculine, almost otherworldly, narrative. Most of all, SP interrogates the nature of heroism and provides a startling answer: since it is Subhadra’s povāḍā and not simply her lāvaṇī, SP makes love (as emotional desire and sexual longing) heroic.

A WHOLE WITHOUT HALVES By the time such narratives reached Kirloskar’s eyes, their presence within a growing city such as Pune may not have been so immanent—

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though it’s difficult to say. Kirloskar’s knowledge of performance traditions, especially of balladry and the poetic expressiveness of itinerant, bardic poetry was fully developed. He had even published his own Naṭyakavitā Saṃgraha or ‘Play-poem collection’ in 1881 of plays he performed in the 1870s before having the idea to stage Śakuntalā. These ‘plays’ were akin to the epic poetry of Moropant as well as some of the poetry staged by Vishnu Bhave (see Chapter 2). At the same time, these poems did not lend themselves to totalising visions—they were episodic and did not bring the entire social body into their vision. As I wrote before, Kirloskar was on the lookout for good stories that he could adapt after his initial success with Śakuntalā. Selecting the marriage of Arjun and Subhadra must have been a logical choice, given its rich literary history, some of which I have given above, and its inclusion in Parshuram Pant Godbole’s Navnīt. In Kirloskar’s hands, these many literary histories are subsumed into one totalising text. His authorial discourse is heteroglossia par excellence: it incorporates prior literary idioms and encompasses the vernacular world. Kirloskar adapts the poetry into the play text, giving characters, especially Subhadra, a voice, akin to the one from SP. But the play is also a timely one—much like Śakuntalā—and it creates emotional expectations even as its specifics are either untenable or impossible in practice.75 Kirloskar realised one very important fact: affection cannot come without interaction—but whence such interaction? The length of the first act and the prologue between the sūtradhār and the actress are fundamental to establishing this play as one about the pre-requisite of interaction for conjugality, whether or not it was part of the current discourse in the world outside of the theatre.76 That is, while it may be true that conjugality remained discursive rather than practised, drama did usher in new emotional expectations and democratise ‘love’—if we are all part of the same total vernacular world, then shouldn’t we all be able to love in the same way? Kirloskar’s play Saṅgīt Saubhadra (1882) is a culmination of these many texts and it bursts through the narrow literary confines and into a prominent space within the social imaginary of Marathi speakers. Its plot follows from the others but with important additions and inflexions. Act 1 begins with a brief conversation between the Sūtradhār and Actress, in which they discuss their daughter’s impending wedding, ensuring that it is a suitable match, not arranged only with respect to money (read: one kind of social status)—before introducing the play. Arjun wanders in the forest of Prabhāsa, singing complaints about everything that has gone wrong, even though he has only been gone for six months and worrying that Subhadra has left him. After a few arias, he encounters Nārad, who characteristically sows mischief by making Arjun’s concerns real: he informs Arjun that he is going to a wedding in

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Dvārkā, where Krishna will give his sister in marriage to Duryodhan! Hearing this, Arjun panics and Nārad has to convince him to not commit suicide and retain his faith in Krishna because we do not know Krishna’s plans. Instead, Nārad encourages Arjun to become a triḍanḍī sannsyāsī—a kind of renouncer who may return to a worldly life if the situation becomes more favourable to him. Just as this happens, we hear a voice off-stage telling us that Subhadra has vanished from her chambers, even though it is her wedding day. It turns out that Subhadra has been miraculously transported from her chambers by a demon to the very forest where Arjun wanders to prevent her from being married. (This plot, to be sure, is very different from the texts above and is adapted from a different episode not present in the MBh, one generation down, with the same conflict, between Arjun’s son Abhimanyu, who wishes to marry Balrām’s daughter Vatsalā.77) After stalling for what seems like an eternity to the reader and audience, Arjun finally approaches Subhadra—who is asleep, and covers her with his shawl; he then departs to kill the demon who has abducted her. When she comes to, she does not recognise him because he is bloodied from killing the demon. She asks for water and as he goes to search for it, the demon transports her back to her palace, leaving Arjun flummoxed about whether the whole thing was just a lucid dream. However, Subhadra does leave behind a small note, in which she suggests that Arjun should become a sannyāsī atop mount Raivataka. (Later on, we find out that Krishna has forged the note, which explains why Subhadra could have left Arjun a note without recognising him.) The later plot follows the epic poetry of Moropant—with only a few notable exceptions that expand the plot from its bare poetic outline. Act 2 contains several conversations between Krishna, Balrām and Subhadra. Subhadra also converses extensively with Rukmini, Krishna’s wife, and engages her help in pleading her case to Krishna. In Act 3, after Arjun gains fame for his (fake) austerities, Balrām and Krishna speak about their experiences taking the sannyāsī’s darśan and Balrām invites the sannyāsī to remove himself from the cave and relocate to Subhadra’s palace. He believes that serving the holy man will help Subhadra recover from her ordeal in the forest. This entire conversation recounts the actual event of their darśan with much humour, and Krishna purposefully agitates Balrām (knowing that Balrām will never believe him) by mentioning how lewd a sannyāsī (Arjun) is, and how he ogled Subhadra during the darśan (which happened between Acts 2 and 3). Act 4 contains a lengthy conversation between Krishna and Rukmiṇī, and then a comic one between Rukmini (who now knows the truth) and Arjun. Act 5 is

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entirely centred around Arjun and Subhadra, and Arjun eventually reveals himself to her and they marry with the sun as a witness. In the following analysis, I focus on these expansions in the play text and the way Kirloskar’s discursive strategies subsume prior literary idioms, generic divisions and of course, the emotional valences that derive from them. Kirloskar is, according to one critic, perhaps the most confident playwright to have ever existed in the Marathi language—and his self-confidence is evident in the ease by which he writes, switching between multiple linguistic registers without the residue of effort and exhaustion.78 This artificiality—bringing together so many different registers—is precisely why it is common to state that Marathi theatre is a playwright’s (as opposed to director’s) theatre.79 The play from which Kirloskar adapted his version, apparently lacked differentiated narrative voices.80 Indeed, Kirloskar writes in a way as to make the artificiality appear natural, and it makes for quick play within the text, permitting Kirloskar to hastily transport us beyond his transgressions of plot, and into the transformations of disparate literary genres into a totalising authorial discourse. Above, I wrote that in the MBh, BP and the SHP, any actual prior meeting or relationship between Subhadra and Arjun is (or would be) highly problematic given notions of modesty and gender segregation. This is apparent in the way Subhadra is quite distant from Arjun in the MBh and the way in which the two only come into physical proximity after Arjun becomes a false holy man (in BP and SHP) when he is served by the Vrinshi clan women at a ritual feast. SHP most ambiguously preserves the separation of men and women into separate spheres of existence through its use of a-cakśulā or ‘un-seen’. Kirloskar, too, preserves this stark gender segregation while also attempting to grapple with the need to transcend the narrative from prior texts to better inflect the sannyasi complot. To do so, Kirloskar writes of Arjun and Subhadra as childhood companions. The emphasis is on childhood and some past time during which they may have actually met and interacted as children and they were, customarily, betrothed, as Arjun sings: ‘When I a kumara and she a kumari, there, we played, our affection grew, and we became dear to each other. Then all determined that she should marry me.’ All this is arranged through the wishes of their parents and Arjun ponders how this earlier childhood promise could be broken.81 These moments, predating much of the discourse on child marriage (especially, for example, the Rukmabai case), remain ideologically ambiguous within the frame of the play—and indeed the entire episode. But the knowledge that Subhadra may be married off to someone else affects Arjun deeply and in a moment of panic, Arjun threatens prāṇ-tyāg—abandonment

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of spirit—and a more sophisticated way to say ātma-hatyā or suicide. None of this is lost on Nārad, who convinces him (via Krishna) to become a sannyāsī. Arjun, however, remains unconvinced, and the play has been accused of portraying an utāvaḷā Arjun—meaning ‘hasty’ or ‘impetuous’—and we can see his impatience early in the play when he interacts with the sage Nārad. However, this literal translation of the word omits an important cultural definition. To describe someone, especially a man, as utāvaḷā is to suggest that he is effeminate and overly eager, with a child-like propensity to lose control of himself. A later playwright and critic, S.P. Kolhatkar, writing in 1903, finds such a portrayal unfitting for an epic hero.82 Kolhatkar’s appraisal comes as a retrospective on the play, 21 years after its first performance and within a society that had witnessed a burgeoning discourse about manliness, effeminacy and child marriage.83 While it is true that Behramji Malabari’s ‘Notes on Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood’ (1884) became something of a rallying cry, followed up at the end of the decade by the Rukmabai case, various disputations were ongoing.84 For example, in 1870, learned śāstrīs and the Shankaracharya, or leader of one the main religious orders of Hinduism held a debate with newly minted graduates of the Marathi intelligentsia. While the new ‘reformist’ graduates lost out on the outcome—seven out of ten authorities rejected widow remarriage— Ranade and others began publishing their own ‘proofs’ derived from Vedic sources shortly thereafter.85 Questions over conjugality were already part of the more literary public’s discourse—and part of that involved redefining marriage for each party involved. Kolhatkar’s interpretations are thus indicative of an insurgent conservatism divorced from the early 1880s. This play largely attempts to create a modest notion of conjugality through the childhood romance plot and Arjun’s anxiety: heroism here is different, and Arjun, while still an epic character, has traits that are decidedly ‘romantic’—lovelorn, anxious and at least a little impetuous, recalling Dushyanta’s lovelorn torpor in Act 6 of Śakuntalā. We see a change in the nature of heroism (and the epic hero)—Arjun shifts his attention away from his (many) affairs during his sojourn to focus solely on this one. By adding such an emphasis on this particular episode and enlarging Arjun’s role within the play beyond one of conquest, trickery and attainment, this play creates a deep emotional discourse for the patterning of male and female affections for each other—one that may or may not culminate in marriage. While it is apparent that Kirloskar departs from previous textual models which are circumscribed within the episodic nature of the MBh, BP and SHP texts, his imaginative method lays the groundwork for redefining that

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episode in his contemporary setting. The dramatic text expands previous versions within a 19th-century zeitgeist. Focusing on the hero’s previous attachment and affection for the heroine; on this affection’s ability to move him and emasculate him—to make him vulnerable at all—is already an epochal shift away from business as usual. And, to round things off, it is eerily ambiguous. Is this drama ‘about’ conjugality? If so, what role does childhood—and child marriage—play in making conjugality possible? For starters, it makes some kinds of heroism less heroic. For her part, Subhadra too, complains about both her brothers and questions Arjun’s faithfulness to her. Her first aria and the opening of the SP above bear some striking resemblances. She sings: Priyakar mājhe bhrāte majavarī niṣṭhurtā hṛdayī dhariti Karmagati aśī kaiśī jhālī āpta sarva vairī hotī Āśā bahu kṛṣṇāvartī Hotī niṣphaḷ jhālī tī Mātātācī gaṇtī vṛddha mhaṇuni koṇī na karitī Sarvahī dādācyā hatī Tyālā koṇī nac vadatī Andhasutāte varṇyāhuni maja mṛtyu barā vaṭe cittīṁ For me, my dear brothers hold cruelty in their hearts. How did my fate come to this? It has made my own into my enemies. I nurtured a great hope in Krishna,86 which has not blossomed. Mother and father count their years and nobody counts their opinion. All are in my eldest brother’s hands and nobody dares speak up. Rather than marry a blind man’s son, to my mind, death feels better.87

In this verse—often omitted from contemporary performances— the overlapping vocabularies with SP are stark and immediately apprehensible. Brothers and family have become her enemy; her elder brother controls everything with a tight fist and she prefers death to her current engagement. These intertextual and intergeneric energies from the earlier texts find a voice in Kirloskar’s Saubhadra. With Arjun’s newly domesticized epic heroism, such passages foreground the emotionality of this romance, contrasting the hero’s forlorn

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condition alongside the heroine’s frustration. Contained within a single dramatic text, uttered within the same theatrical space, to the same audience, these two characters come together in an unprecedented way, unavailable within the space of performed ballads (povāḍā) or heroic poetry (kāvya; ākhyān). That is, they do not occupy the same poetic (and emotional) space in genres other than Kirloskar’s play; subsuming their narratives into the dramatic text formalises the transformation of ‘many’ Subhadras into ‘one’ Subhadra. I speak about some of the implications below—but I want to further highlight how Kirloskar incorporates prior literary texts into his play, beyond the narrative arc. At the level of diction, for example, Saubhadra remains heavily indebted to both SHP and SP. Above, for example, the indictment of her brothers, who sideline her parents, is telling. Brothers both here and in SP, have become ‘enemies’ and are thus no different from Duryodhan, who is ‘evil’—both translations of ‘vairī’. Subhadra’s laments are more significant when placed back within the context of the play and her addressee. In the passage above, she is alone in the forest and unaware that Arjun is nearby overhearing her lamentation. In later passages, this pattern continues and she expresses herself only with her servants, with Rukmini and in the absence of men. Only other women and the audience are privy to her thoughts and the audience thus gains insight into a feminine world. Act two plays on the openness and secrecy of expression and highlights Subhadra’s plight by enabling her to voice her concerns to the audience while adding some comic touches in the process. After a brief conversation in which Balrām tells Krishna about a new ascetic on the mountain, Balrām then proceeds to elaborate a theory about Subhadra’s disappearance. Apparently, sometimes powerful and enchanting (māyāvī) yakśiṇīs (minor female deities) hold grudges against people— these minor deities need to be pacified.88 Such moments, exploited for their comic potential in contemporary performances, also leave Subhadra flustered—in order to pacify the yakśiṇīs, Balrām sprinkles holy water on her and also ties an amulet around her right arm, emphatically making sure all the servants know exactly which arm. For the audiences, these moments are punctuated by Subhadra’s asides, in which she asks, ‘Will this holy water calm my rage?’ and then a little later, ‘What nonsense! What caused my rage—without looking into that, they have such nonsensical remedies! Let it be, they’re my parents, and I should do what they ask.’89 Comedy in this regard, very clearly and simply creates a knowing community—between what Krishna and the audience know, what Subhadra only partially knows and that which is unknown to Balrām. The latter’s false remedies only add to the humour, which critiques purportedly superstitious practices. The moments in

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which Subhadra communicates directly with the audience remind us of the ways in which intra-familial hierarchies operate and create comic dissonance. Often the kids know something the adults do not. These asides and Subhadra’s plight are more significant than creating collective laughter at the expense of authority figures such as Balrām. More than that, they grant large audiences access to situations where Saubhadra (and perhaps women more generally) express their concerns. As soon as the amulet has been tied and Subhadra purified, Krishna and Balrām leave. Next, Subhadra begins a series of not one, not two, not three, but seven arias! These many arias break the silent communication from moments before and give us (as readers or spectators) a catholic, indiscriminate access to Subhadra’s private emotional turmoil. In private, she is definitely more forthcoming about her passions and the dramatic text remains (if one considers how it is commonly staged today) quite disruptive. In a situation where her family is populated by divine beings, Subhadra’s statements gain something of a heretical force. Most of all, these songs are addressed to her servant, who is her sakhi or female friend, and there are no men present to overhear them—much like the two women in SP. Each aria builds on the former: the first is about her fate within a respectable family, born with shackles around her neck; in the second, she asks who will protect her and says she will fall at his feet; the third describes Revati (Balrām’s wife) as her antagonist; the fourth accuses Krishna of being equally black on the inside as he is on the outside because he knows her feelings and does nothing; the fifth turns to the shawl that Arjun placed over her in the forest—and she worries why he returned it to her; the sixth describes how even the tame gardens with their birds are unbearable; and in the seventh, she summarises her entire mood and asks to be poisoned and released.90 These arias also extend her resolve and her attachment to Arjun in ways similar to SP, and their language, especially in the final aria, invokes some of the language and themes from SP: Kitī saṅgu tula maja caina nase / he duḥkha tarī mī sāhu kase / yā samaya malā naca koṇī puse / hā viraha sakhe maja bhājitase man kase āvarū / kitī dhīr dharū / kase karū he bandhu navhat mama vairī khare / dāvītī kase vari prem bare / bolonī pāḍītī hṛdayāsī dhare / noko noko malā jīv / viṣ tari pājiv / sakhe soḍiv How can I tell you that I cannot bear it? How can I bear this sorrow? At this moment, nobody can soothe me, this viraha, my dear, burns me. How can I compose my thoughts? How should I hold out hope? How?

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These are not my kinsman, but true enemies. They say they’ll marry me to my love, instead they destroy my heart’s confidence. No, no, I don’t want [this] life. Feed me poison, my dear, and release me.91 (emphases added)

Here too, we once again see her separation, sorrow and resolve, in moments akin and indebted to SP. If not Arjun, then why bother at all? In modern productions, the italicised sections above are often omitted, perhaps demonstrating the ways in which respectable society still shuns women’s desire. These are the very intertextual and ‘low-brow’ sections whose energies still need to be contained. Amusingly, at this point, the text indicates a servant offstage calling to them. Clearly, dramaturgically, Kirloskar knows that after such an aria, what real comfort can her friend and servant offer her? And what better way to let the emotion rest and permeate the spectator’s experience than to leave the heroine’s last aria on the note of suicide? Within the semantics of emotion, we see something quite curious throughout Subhadra’s speech, as well as in the way her brothers and servants interpret her. Everyone is concerned about her ordeal in the forest and thinks she has been frightened (bhiūn gelī) and that her general health (prakṛtī) has been affected. And yet, Subhadra’s speech and what her sakhis say is quite different. She says, ‘Brother, listen. Don’t you unnecessarily embarrass me! I am not so fortunate that, illness will end my damned life!’92 Balrām thinks that Saubhadra believes he is accusing her of disappearing and he immediately clarifies the air—comically supported by Krishna. But once they disappear, and in her aside, the words she and her sakhi most frequently use to describe her feelings are santāp, rāg and occasionally, kop. All are various registers of anger, but more specifically: excessive heat and burning (santāpa), mental agitation (rāga) and occasionally ‘straightforward’ anger (kopa). That is, the totality of her expression in song and verse seems to stem from these multiple angers, each different, yet communicable privately to other women, and to audiences via staging.93 These semantics— various forms of ‘anger’, love (both as sexual desire and emotional attachment), and the feeling of oppression and silencing are mapped onto respectability and class in Subhadra’s very first aria: Unfortunate being born to a respectable family/ Always shackled at my neck How to cast them off/ This prison reeks If born into poverty/ surely they wouldn’t sacrifice me94

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The mapping of class and the language of freedom and enslavement permeate this text. But it isn’t love that enslaves one, it is family. And it is family that can, or should, set one free as well. Within the dramatic text, the workings behind the scenes (intervention by Rukmini on behalf of Subhadra, for example) are the vehicles for Subhadra’s freedom from sacrifice. Such treatment also, and importantly, brings epic and religious complots down to the domestic level, and Kirloskar treats divine figures as everyday ones, making them more intimate for the audience. Two more quick notes before looking into Kirloskar’s and (Saubhadra’s) contexts: Krishna as kapaṭ or with ‘guile’ and ‘deceit’ and the haraṇ genre. This play finds absolutely no problem in Krishna’s līlā or divine play: it is evident that his divine play is endorsed by the playwright, given that the word kapaṭ is used to describe Krishna by Balrām in a negative way, and Nārad and Arjun in a positive way.95 The presence of divine play—plotting—permeates the main body of this dramatic text, without any offense in its immediate reception.96 Secondly, Kirloskar transforms the haraṇ genre—when the Vrishnis do go to bathe, Arjun and Subhadra carefully sneak away and Arjun slowly reveals himself to her. At this moment, the letter and necklace that she left behind while she was in the forest and Arjun’s shawl come in handy. She does not believe it is Arjun and needs the letter and necklace as proof. These further emphasise the childhood romance, adolescent separation and adult reunion: viraha, vipralaṃbha and saṁbhoga. As described above, the poetic world of Saubhadra incorporates prior poetic idioms into its own dramatic body. These poetic idioms include the playfulness of Krishna derived from a more earthy tradition and the colloquial and desirous aspirations of Subhadra. They also include an expansion of the comic through Balrām, who remains the butt of all jokes throughout this text, functioning also to lambast a version of highly Sanskritised, overbearing paternal authority, whom he represents. We see some of this is SHP when Balrām’s entourage cannot but praise their enemy Arjun. However, Kirloskar’s is a text whose seams show—and while they do not burst, Kirloskar’s authorial discourse enables prior literary idioms to coexist, in ways impossible outside of his dramatic text. This world has an inside and an outside, rather than just one or the other; it gives an outlet for women’s voices from inside their own spaces, while also entangling them within a male political world—it connects these two worlds through Krishna’s ingenious complots. There is more to say here—one can speak about the role of religion, the role of servants, the specific kinds of music and various other topics—but these are for another study. Each of these presents us with its ideologeme, and the way the dramatic text functions, we see a poetic world constituted by both centripetal and centrifugal tendencies

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that clash with each other and remain in taut tension throughout. This tension is unavailable within the bodies of earlier poetic expressions (such as SHP and SP or BP). Furthermore, while this is, like the earlier versions, a poetic expansion of the epic text—hardly unique—the relationship between Kirloskar’s whole-that-is-a-part and the MBh, a whole with many parts, needs further research.97 We rarely, anymore, consider literatures as ways of knowing our social world, of creating it, as epistemologies with ontological consequences. The story of Subhadra and Arjun is such a world-making story.

PLAYING SUBHADRA, A PUBLIC WORLD Here, I want to connect some of the aforementioned discussions to the play’s staging and reception. The most significant aspect of this play’s staging and reception had to do with the character of Subhadra. Unlike the Śakuntalā production, which did not have any verse or arias for Shakuntala in the initial production, Saubhadra was written and staged with the character of Subhadra in mind. The actor who had initially played Shakuntala could not sing—and while he played a vital part in the company’s business and other activities well into the 1920s, this greatly affected the reception of Śakuntalā.98 For this purpose, Kirloskar went to great lengths to find a male singer who could play female roles in this and his other plays. The story of finding someone who could sing connects many different worlds in colonial India and speaks to how the Kirloskar Company had permeated the worlds of Bombay and Pune intelligentsia. After searching for some time, Kirloskar received word from an interpreter at the Bombay High Court, who was the ward to two sons of a former harīdās: a ‘servant of hari’ but more specifically akin to a travelling bard—such as Rām Jośī, Moropant or a kīrtankār and buvā like the fellow in the farce Women Enchanted by a Story (see Chapter 5). The two sons, however, lived in Baroda and had grown up under the patronage of Maharaja Khanderao Gaikwad (r. 1856–1870) and his successor Sayajirao Gaekwad (r. 1875–1939), both of whom were wealthy patrons of the arts.99 Kirloskar was able to convince the elder of the two to come to Pune and watch his performance of Śakuntalā in 1882. Having seen the production, Ramchandra Kolhatkar suggested that his younger brother was more appropriate for the role, especially given that he had a stable job as an engineer in Baroda. Returning to Baroda, Ramchandra sent his younger brother Lakshman (1862–1901) in his place, who joined the Kirloskar Company in September of 1882, two months before Saubhadra’s premiere.100

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Far from being an insignificant event, Bhaurao, as Lakshman was known, was essential to Saubhadra. Without his stage presence, and most of all, without his singing capabilities, this play would not have been able to fully articulate Subhadra’s concerns and give her a poetic voice. Indeed, training as a former kīrtankār was a huge advantage in performance, because it enabled a form of traditional knowledge to be incorporated into a new kind of performance. Kīrtankārs were among the many kinds of ‘pandit-kavīs’ whose knowledge of various Indic traditions made them function at the interface between (and I use these for convenience’s sake) Chatterjee’s inner and outer realms of colonial society.101 They were co-creators of both performance knowledges as well as textual ones as I have mentioned with Godbole in Chapter 2. The list of Marathi kīrtankārs who moved into performance and edited poetry collections is a large one102—and this speaks to a different trajectory for performance traditions that were involved in musical productions parallel to and intersecting with musicians such as Maula Bakhsh (1833–1896) and Ustad Abdul Karim Khan (1872–1927), both of whom were also present at the Baroda court during the same time as Bhaurao Kolhatkar.103 For Kirloskar, the search for an appropriate actor was itself a search for a kind of poetic knowledge, especially regarding performance, just as he had experience performing kīrtans in the late 1870s. Both at a textual level as well as at the level of performance then, prior literary-performance idioms and their practitioners were central to this new dramatic form. In practice, reading about Bhaurao Kolhatkar’s contribution, one is struck by the way people describe his stage presence and ability to connect with audiences, with only two months of rehearsals. In his 1903 book on the Marathi stage, Appaji Kulkarni notes that more than Śakuntalā, Kirloskar’s first important innovation was that here, the woman’s role had songs. That is, in giving Bhaurao the role of Subhadra, he put plenty of songs in his mouth. Bhaurao was beautiful to look at, and his voice was sweet…and very soon developed the nickname ‘Bhāvḍyā’.

Kulkarni then goes on to recall a story in which members of a different troupe praise Bhaurao’s rare talent, and in which the townsfolk only recognise the actor by his nickname rather than his full name, indicating the level of felt intimacy between the audiences and the actor.104 But it gets better. Kulkarni writes: Bhāūrāvāñcā āvāj pāhāḍī asūn goḍ hota. Śivāy nakhrebāj gāṇyāce ḍhaṅg tyāñcyā aṅgī purṇapaṇe aslyāmuḷe raṅgabhūmīvar yeūn āplyā padyās survāt kelī kī uttam nāgasarācyā āvājane nāg jasā ḍolū lāgto tadvat

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bhāūrāvañcyā gāṇyāne prekśak samūha bharūn jāūn tohī ānandāne ḍolū lāge. Nāṭyagṛhāt kitīhī daṅgā va kalkalāṭ aso, bhāūrāv raṅgabhūmīvar āle kī jikḍe tikḍe śuk hoūn maṇḍaḷīce lakśya prayogākaḍe lāge. Yāce pratyantar naṭīcā veṣ gheūn prathamāraṁbhī te raṅgabhūṃīvar āle mhaṇje lokās veḷoveḷī ālec āhe. Bhāūrāvāñcā āvāj pāhāḍī va goḍ hota, tasāc to puṣkaḷ caḍhathī hotā. Don tīn sāptakānparyanta te tān mārīt asat.yāñcya susvar va mohak gāṇyāne saubhadra nāṭakātīl subhadrecī padye lokās atyanta priy jhālī hotī; va śāḷes jāṇāri vidyārthī kiṁvā rastyātil lahānsān porahī tī padye guṇguṇat jāt. Utsavprasaṅgī athvā karmaṇukī sāṭḥī gavaī lokañcī khāsgī gāṇī hoū lāglī kī tyannā hī nāṭakātīl padye mhaṇyāviṣayī āgraha hoī; va gulhausī lok nācbaiṭhakīt … sanayīvāle, sāraṅgīvāle, va peṭīvāle tar yā nāṭakācyā padyañca vyāsaṅga karū lāgle. Evhḍhec navhe tar kathā, kirtan … padyanśivāy to sājrā hot nase. Bhaurao’s voice was pāhāḍī and yet sweet. Also, because he had the ruses of nakhre-bāj wholly in his body, when he came on stage and began his aria, just as a snake sways to the proficient nāgasar, so too the audience took its fill and swayed to Bhaurao’s song. No matter how much noise and confusion in the theatre, whenever Bhaurao came on stage, everyone fell silent and directed their attention to the performance. Because he always played the actress [at the beginning] people came on time. Just as his voice was pāhāḍī and sweet, it also climbed. He sang tāns up to two and three octaves [apart]. His pleasant and enchanting song made Subhadra’s songs in Saubhadra extremely dear; and students and children playing on the streets would sing as they went. During festivals and celebrations, singers were often encouraged to sing these arias; similarly in voluptuary nāc-baiṭhaks … Shenai players, Sārangi players, and harmonium players began to make careers on nāṭya-saṅgīt. Moreover, this also affected the kathā and kīrtankārs.105

At least some of the aforementioned descriptions may be an exaggeration—though, once again, it is difficult to say. We often hear people playing the latest tunes on their phones, from windows, through their headphones—how can we assume that people did not use the technologies at their disposal similarly to ‘recreate’ tunes in the 19th century? Foremost among these technologies was, of course, their voice. The most interesting parts of this description, to me, are the moments when we gain a sense of the materiality of Bhaurao Kolhatkar’s voice and stage presence. Kulkarni mentions that his voice was both pāhāḍī and sweet. Pāhāḍī as an adjective, literally signifies ‘hilly’, which I here take to mean slightly ‘coarse’. But pāhāḍī is also a rāg and a specifically light-classical raga used often in folk melodies, playful and more

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emotionally licentious—in theory as well as practice.106 What makes this moment unique is that Bhaurao’s voice is both pāhāḍī and sweet (goḍa). Kulkarni goes out of his way to mention both, indicating that the two together is indeed a special case. Furthermore, he had the ruses (ḍhaṇg) of nakhre-bāj in his body—Kulkarni uses the locative case for ‘body’, aṇgī. That is, Bhaurao had the gestural vocabulary of a (perhaps even female) performer as well as the vocal abilities to add nakhre (ornamentation) to his singing; this capability was natural to him inscribed on his body. Kulkarni’s thick description adds some flesh onto largely ephemeral and textual bones.107 It enables us to theorise, if not visualise, the transfer of epic poetic knowledges into dramatic knowledges beyond the textual and into the performance itself. One of these knowledges is indeed that of performance, often to recreate female sexuality. The constellation of pāhāḍī, sweet, nakhre-bāj and the performer’s body conjure intimacies with lāvaṇī and thuṃrī as performance genres that also make their way into this production. From the performance, its actual impact on social practices is evident in these descriptions as well as those of Bhaurao’s biographer, who similarly describes the circulation of songs outside the theatrical space. Saṅgīt Ghotāḷā or ‘Musical Confusion’, which I speak about in Chapter 5, parodies precisely such a phenomenon—of how music from the performance overflows its confines in a wonderful show of poetic solidarity in the form of inner and outer integration through the performance. This poetic excess and presence remain one of the most definite means of new emotional scripting. Figure 3.5 from the previous chapter is a snapshot of an ‘unknown Indian Theatrical Troupe’ taken in Bombay in 1870—but I suspect the date to be much later. I suspect that this photograph is of the Kirloskar Troupe from the early 1880s. In it, we see an obvious Nārad, the largest figure in the frame, with a leopard skin across his back. His hair is tied up and he carries a walking stick. He looks to his right at (whom I believe to be) Arjun, who wears a lavish turban studded with jewels and pearls. Arjun also carries an arrow in his left hand, which is difficult to see but indicates his heroic attributes. In the centre, standing and looking straight at the camera, we see Krishna (I think), whose left hand is appropriately holding a cow’s horn. Two women wear headdresses and are presumably the royal women of this play: Subhadra and Rukmini. It’s not entirely clear, however, that the actors are women, and one of them could be Bhaurao Kolhatkar playing his strī-bhumikā or a woman’s role. While this photograph, like the other one from the previous chapter, may be of an entirely different theatre troupe, the consistency of representation makes at least a few characters visible: the arrow, the cow, the leopard skin. We also see the incongruity of an ‘English looking parlour’ that the reviewer from Chapter 2 spoke about with reference to

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Vishnudas Bhave. At the same time, we now also know of the heroine’s voice, whose texture enabled the play’s popularity—and indeed made the performance phenomenalise ‘the poetic voice’ in a sense.108 We know, for instance, that Saubhadra enabled Kirloskar to completely abandon his government career and embark on a theatrical one. Kirloskar’s world, certainly, changed. The play was performed over 100 times from 1884 to 1889, the six years after Kirloskar’s death and it always generated more profits than Śakuntalā. Furthermore, the theatre troupe circulated all over the western Deccan, as far south as Belgaum and Hubli, and inland to Nagpur. It also travelled to Gwalior, Indore and once to Benaras.109 And it has remained a part of the repertoire to this day—and not simply with an academic interest in revivals as with the Parsi theatre. Kirloskar’s itineraries often required his troupe members to settle down in a town for many days at a time. Going over the record of their itinerary, it is remarkable how little time the troupe spent not travelling. Aside from the holiday seasons, generally late-September through early November, the troupe was continuously on the go. On its travels, the Kirloskar Company always received visitors and memoirs often tell of the way guests would dine with the company and watch rehearsals. This speaks, like the music, to the way the Kirloskar Company itself was a presence within the cities it visited, closely associated as it was with the intelligentsia. While there are few actual descriptions from the 1880s of these interactions (most are from the 1910s), we do get a sense of how invested the intelligentsia was in Kirloskar’s projects when we read their correspondence. With Śakuntalā, for example, Kirloskar rehearsed at Deccan College, and it is safe to assume more than a few of Pune’s more recent graduates as well as faculty were present. I have already mentioned a translator at the Bombay High Court whose ward Bhaurao Kolhatkar, became a part of the Kirloskar Company. But Kirloskar also had other contacts at the Bombay High Court, including a Mahadev Chimnaji Apte, a lawyer at the high court and also a knowledgeable Sanskritist who had established the Anand Ashram Samstha in Pune, where I found Moropant’s manuscript (see Figure 2.1). His recommendations to Kirloskar are a concise snapshot of many thematic concerns that are interwoven into this play.110 He makes a comparison, for example, with two other theatre troupes who had recently visited Bombay, performing a Marathi translation of Romeo and Juliet, a 16th-century English drama, a Marathi translation of Little Clay Cart, a (2nd century?) Sanskrit drama and another Marathi translation of Ratnāvalī, a 7th-century Sanskrit drama written by King Harṣa. Of these, he mentions Little Clay Cart as the best, but not particularly special in its staging. The other two were apparently terrible to watch, for reasons not given. He advises him to

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stage a play whose story is known (such as an ākhyān), which is why Śakuntalā was so successful. In advising him further, however, Apte mentions, ‘the story of Subhadra that you told me, that only has male-female relations and viraha, but I didn’t see anything else. Because there should be at least a little vinod rasa [humour], I have sent you the dialogues of Shankara and Parvati from the Kumara[sambhava] to imitate….’111 Apte goes out of his way also to mention drawing inspiration from ‘European Opera’ and of course, these connections also exist. Savoy opera—especially those of Gilbert and Sullivan, often toured to Bombay in the 1880s, along with a host of other troupes. The Bandmann Company, known for its melodramatic and ‘more serious’ drama also toured through Bombay and Kirloskar’s biographer, S.B. Mujumdar, even wrote about it in 1910. Indian students especially followed these tours, and in the case of Bandmann, several Parsi students also took part in his production.112 These indicate strong outside influences in the way Kirloskar went about his writing and staging. They do not, however, detract from the internal influences from his social equals, as well as Marathi poetic traditions. Indeed, it is almost an overstatement to characterise opera as a real ‘influence’ given that singing and music were always significant parts of the performance in Marathi poetic traditions. There are plenty of other luminaries whose correspondences attest to the ways in which Kirloskar’s Company was fundamentally a collective project of the Marathi intelligentsia—B.G. Tilak, M.G. Ranade and G.G. Agarkar, L.M. Kunte, K.B. Marathe—all of these people engaged Kirloskar’s attention and provided him with various kinds of recommendations, assistance and praise. It’s hard to imagine a more ‘public’ group of intellectuals from this era. Ranade and Agarkar, for example, were the pre-eminent social reformers of the day, with solid scholarly reputations to boot. Tilak was the chief editor of two Indian newspapers and would become, in the following few years, the first Indian to articulate a desire for independence—he too was involved with another theatre company that soon merged with Kirloskar’s. Marathe was a member of the Prarthana Samaj—a movement for religious reform founded as a sister organisation of the Brahmo Samaj of Calcutta. Essentially, Kirloskar successfully connected with and received both feedback and praise from the intellectual elite of the day. This too, was a kind of performative and material ‘excess’—one that enabled the theatre to spill beyond its performance frames and into society at large, enabling him and others to project their totalising visions onto society. It invested those outside the theatre with what happens inside and affectively tied them together into common projects of value.

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These overlaps between the internal and external frames of reference demarcate the fundamentally public nature of these productions. They are not contained, even as they contain prior poetic traditions that are thoroughly adapted and reworked. Nor are they private affairs, received as novels; we know how people felt about the plays, and the literary circles Kirloskar (and then his troupe) navigated. Śakuntalā and Saubhadra, as well as his incomplete play, Rāmrājyaviyog, created the vernacular world through performance, mobility, popular access and elite mediation. Fundamentally, as I wrote in the introduction, creating these worlds was about co-opting the poetic world and bringing it into focus through the literary text. It was about containing the ‘subaltern counter-publics’ that were constitutive of other voices—Bakhtinian ideologemes—especially those of women, that Nancy Fraser has theorised in response to Habermas, and redirecting those energies into a totalising (and familial) world view.113 Kirloskar’s plays were all incursions into that world, predominantly operating via performance, and as such were interventions, using literary technologies to interrupt and refashion performative technologies of transfer. At the same time, this incursion still subsisted at the performative level, collapsing the public ‘sphere’ into public ‘space’ and thus almost literally creating worlds—within and without—the performance. In a sense, these externalities ensure that performance is not entirely ephemeral—we can ‘think of performance as a medium in which disappearance negotiates, perhaps becomes, materiality. That is, disappearance is passed through’ (italics original).114 Drama, poetry, as performed, are especially constitutive of this newly imagined 19th-century world, given their fundamentally prior status to ‘literature’ conceptually and textually. While some recent work has gone a long way to critiquing the rise of the novel in literary studies,115 it is interesting to return to one of Bakhtin’s exponents, Michael Holquist. In an article published in 1980, Holquist writes, The study of novels has suffered in the past from a canonical bias which has regarded them as an inferior form of high literature…. What is needed is a recognition of the dialectical position of novels in the larger system of literary and social ideologies: their critique of literature as an institution, their opposition to system as a mode of thought.116

It is difficult for me to imagine a time when novels did not hold such a hegemonic sway over literary studies as an institution, and when novels were not the predominant genre studied and written about in literary studies of the past two centuries. What would it mean today

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to instead reverse Holquist’s position and replace the novel with performance or dramatic performance? It seems what is needed now is rather positioning of other forms of literary experience, especially in South Asia, but also beyond.117 While I share Mufti’s sentiment that an alternative world literature could be written if we were to focus on the ghazal as a genre—I propose expanding that to consider poetry more generally as well as ‘performance’, not just for Marathi, or Mufti’s northern South Asia but for most of South Asia in the 19th century.118 It is now time to see non-novelistic forms as critiques of (novelistic) literature as an institution and also see them in a dialectical position to the written, privately consumed world of novelistic prose. Performance, as described above, was indeed a mode of thought and feeling, and a collective manifestation of an intimately vernacular world, one that saw the emergence of love as romantic attachment and sexual desire.

NOTES  1 Charles Baudelaire, Edward K. Kaplan and Charles Baudelaire, The Parisian prowler le spleen de Paris, petits poèmes en prose (Athens, Ga. [u.a.]: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 21.   2 Dilip M. Menon, ‘A Place Elsewhere: Lower-Caste Malayalam Novels of the Nineteenth Century’, in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (Orient Blackswan, 2004), 482. See also Dilip Menon, ‘Lower Caste Malayalam Novels of the 19th Century’, in Early Novels in India, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), 41–72.   3 Aniket Jaaware, ‘Two Sentences: A Speculation on Genre in Early Marathi Novels’, in Early Novels in India, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), 73–80.   4 Bhanudas Shridar Paranjape, Arvācīna Marāṭhī vaṅmayācā itihāsa, I. Sa. 1800 te 1874 (Puṇe: Vhīnasa Prakāśana, 1997), 502–505.   5 Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, South Asia across the Disciplines 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). See also Frances W. Pritchett, Marvelous Encounters: Folk Romance in Urdu and Hindi (Riverdale, Md., USA: Riverdale Co., 1985).   6 Shankar Bapuji Mujumdar, Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra (Pune: Jagaddhitecchu Chapakhana, 1904), 107.  7 Mahadev Govind Ranade, ‘Remarks on the Marathi Portion of the Catalogue’, in Catalogue of Native Publications in the Bombay ..., ed. Sir Alexander Grant, 2nd ed. (Bombay: Education society’s Press, 1867), 32, https://archive.org/stream/catalogueofnativ00bomb#page/n41/ mode/2up. He also mentions that Muktamala and Rājāmadan are the best

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prose works along with ‘Mr. Krishnashastri’s’ translation of the Arabian Nights. See Ranade, 27. Mujumdar, Annasaheb Kirloskar Yanche Charitra, 107–108. David Dean Shulman, More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012), 18–19, 111–112, 115–117. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 332–333. Bakhtin, 272. In addition to these, Kosambi lists some other variants, see Meera Kosambi, Gender, Culture and Performance: Marathi Theatre and Cinema before Independence (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), 91. One of these was indeed a drama—fully textualised with musical numbers—called Subhadra-haran (1879), by M.V. Kelkar. Unfortunately, I was unable to locate the play to include here. The scholarship on ‘reform’ is vast. For a locally specific version, see Anne Feldhaus, Images of Women in Maharashtrian Society (SUNY Press, 1998). See also Jim Masselos, Towards nationalism: group affiliations and the politics of public associations in 19th century Western India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974). Paula Richman, Many Rāmāyaṇas the Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). See also Paula Richman, ed., Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition (Berkeley [u.a.]: University of California Press, 2001); Heidi Rika Maria Pauwels, ed., Indian Literature and Popular Cinema: Recasting Classics, 1. publ, Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series. - London [u.a.]: Routledge, 2006- 6 (London [u.a.]: Routledge, 2007). As cited in William Sax, Dancing the Self : Personhood and Performance in the Pandav Lila of Garhwal (USA: Oxford University Press, 2002), 55. Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata (Bombay: The Asiatic Society of Bombay, 1957), 3. See, for example, Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Dining out at Lake Pampa: The Shabari Episode in Multiple Ramayanas’, in Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, ed. Paula Richman (Berkeley [u.a.]: University of California Press, 2001), 119–136; Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Performance in a World of Paper: Puranic Histories and Social Communication in Early Modern India’, Past & Present 219, no. 1 (1 May 2013): 87–126. Lutgendorf even mentions the ‘mythological musicals of the Bombay film industry’. Lutgendorf, ‘Dining out at Lake Pampa: The Shabari Episode in Multiple Ramayanas’, 132. As cited in Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500–1900 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 8. N.J. Allen, ‘A ProtoIndoEuropean Story’, in Myth and Mythmaking: Continuous Evolution in Indian Tradition, ed. Julia Leslie (Routledge, 2014), 1–20. Kevin McGrath, Heroic Kr̥ ṣṇa: Friendship in Epic Mahābhārata, 2013, 141–142. See esp. n.15 on 142.

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202 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 21 Pratāpacandra Rāya and Kisari Mohan Ganguli, The Mahabharata (Calcutta: Bharata Press, 1884), 604–605, http://archive.org/details/ cu31924071123099. I have chosen to use the Raya and Ganguli translation of 1884 as something that is relatively contemporaneous with the play . Sangīt Saubhadra (1882). It is apparent that van Buitenen’s 1973 translation updates the language, but not so much the episode’s contents. 22 I do not mean to imply that ascetics cannot have an eros all their own. And there is, perhaps, just the hint of this ascetic eros throughout the play, even as Arjun is a false ascetic. For more on these themes—the eros of asceticism, false asceticism for seduction, among others, see Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva, the Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 23 Rāya and Ganguli, The Mahabharata, 608. 24 See for instance, P. Anandacharlu, ‘On Social Reform: A Statement’, in Indian Social Reform, ed. C. Yajnewvara Chintamani (at the Minerva Press, 1901), 27–86, http://archive.org/details/indiansocialrefo029405mbp, accessed 27 January 2016; Mrs Kamala Sathianadhan, ‘The Position of Woman in Ancient and Modern India’, in Indian Social Reform, ed. C. Yajnewvara Chintamani (at the Minerva Press, 1901), 335–361, http:// archive.org/details/indiansocialrefo029405mbp, accessed 27 January 2016; Rao Bahadur Wamanrao M. Kolhatkar, ‘Widow Re-Marriage’, in Indian Social Reform, ed. C. Yajnewvara Chintamani (at the Minerva Press, 1901), 282–311, http://archive.org/details/indiansocialrefo029405mbp, accessed 27 January 2016; Mahadev Govind Ranade, Religious and Social Reform: A Collection of Essays and Speeches, ed. M.B. Kolasker (Bombay: Gopal Narayen, 1902), 30–31. I speak about these sources some more below. 25 Ranade, ‘Remarks on the Marathi Portion of the Catalogue’, 32. 26 Ibid. 27 Walimbe, Sugam Marathi Vyakaran Lekhan (Nitin Prakashan, 2014), 217. In the āryā meter, each line contains a distribution of 12 syllables before a caesura, and 18 after; a verse is comprised of a couplet. The exact patterning of the syllables as heavy or light is unimportant. For information on how to recite an āryā, see Anna C. Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 151. 28 Baḷavant Kirloskar, Sangit Saubhadra, ed. Kulkarni, Bhimrao, 4th ed. (Pune: Snehavardhan Publishing House, 2007), 9. 29 Rām Jośī, Vi. Ma Kulakarṇī, and Gaṅgādhara Moraje, Rāmajośīkr̥ta Lāvaṇyā: prastāvanā, ṭīpā yāsaha sampādita (Puṇe: Padmagandhā Prakāśana, 1998), 12–13. 30 Sheldon Pollock, Reader on Rasa: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2016), 52. 31 J.A.B. van Buitenen and James L Fitzgerald, The Mahābhārata (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 15. 32 In the MBh, he is, in some cases, almost one aspect of Krishna himself. See ‘Two Krishnas’ in McGrath, Heroic Kr̥ ṣṇa. For more on this, see V.S.

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Sukthankar’s analysis of their relationship: Sukthankar, On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata, 100. 33 Here, I use the 1882 edition of the Navnīt because of the text’s legibility, but the versification is numbered slightly differently in the 1873 and 1895 editions: Paraśurām Ballāḷ Goḍabole and Rāvajī Śāstrī Goḍabole, eds., The Navanīta, or Selections from the Marathi Poets, New Edition (Bombay: Government Central Book Depot, 1882), 210–214. 34 Hala=plough; dhara=holding (because he is a pupil of Balrām) 35 A place of pilgrimage near Dwarka. 36 Krishna, Balrām and Subhadra are Arjun’s maternal cousins, the sons and daughter of Arjun’s maternal uncle. 37 Dhritarashtra, the blind king of Hastinapur, is Duryodhan’s father. 38 Here, I translated a-cakśulā idiomatically as ‘uncorrupted’ even though its literal meaning is ‘unseen’. 39 A kind of renouncer who may re-enter society. 40 And epithet of Yudhisthir is ‘Dharmaraj’, the King of Dharma. 41 Buitenen and Fitzgerald, The Mahābhārata, 407. See also ‘GRETIL Mahabharata’, http://gretil.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/2_epic/ mbh/sas/mahabharata.htm, accessed 19 April 2016. The text of the MBh similarly juxtaposes these moments, see verse 211, in which those who know of when to abduct are called dharmavidah or ‘adept in law’. 42 McGrath, Heroic Kr̥ ṣṇa, 1. 43 Paraśurām Ballāḷ Goḍabole and Rāvajī Śāstrī Goḍabole, eds., The Navanīta, or Selections from the Marathi Poets, New Edition (Bombay: Government Central Book Depot, 1882), 210–214. 44 ṭopā kavacācyā. 45 ya ṭopā kavacācyā bhima walgā ugeci, atopā. 46 adoring devotee = premaḷ bhakta; salvation = mukunda-kathā this is my idiomatic translation. 47 Bhaṭ-kaṭak, literally ‘priests-[and]-soldiers’. 48 This is a common trope, very legible, and the source of humour across various cultures. The antagonist’s (Balrām’s) retinue is populated by incompetent fools in comparison to Arjun. In relating the abduction to Balrām, they cannot but praise Arjun’s skill in battle and his ferocity. Kirloskar’s play (see below) makes Balrām himself the fool. 49 The implication is that Balrām doesn’t need those things to overcome Arjun. 50 Moropant, Moropantkrut Prakarane, Bhag 1, ed. J.B. Modak (Pune: Dnyan Prakash, 1883), 13. 51 Rām Jośī, Vi. Ma Kulakarṇī, and Gaṅgādhara Moraje, Rāmajośīkr̥ta Lāvaṇyā: prastāvanā, ṭīpā yāsaha sampādita (Puṇe: Padmagandhā Prakāśana, 1998), 9. 52 I translated cāṇdāḷ as ‘reaper’. Properly speaking, a cāṇḍāḷ is one from or associated with a set of castes that perform the funerary functions at crematoriums during and after cremation rites, work with leather, may be hunter, etc. who perform labours that may be necessary and are nonetheless polluting. Some today simply translate the term as ‘Dalit’.

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204 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 53 This carries a sexual innuendo—Duryodhan had his ‘fill’ and left. 54 hinḍapirā: I translated this as ‘wandering like a pir’. Here, I take pirto mean a sufi mystic more generally, not necessarily a teacher or a guide. 55 Kāśī, another name for Benares or Varanasi. 56 One of the 12 lingams of Shiva, the legend has it that Rama had to pay obeisance to Shiva in Kāśī, for which Shiva granted him the stone-bridge to Lanka. Arjun follows this same trajectory. 57 These are all names of rivers. 58 By vyankaṭeś, I believe the poet and the speaker means the Venkateshvara temple of Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh. 59 panḍharpūr bhu-vaikunṭhālā ālā harījan māherī: I translated ‘harījan’ as ‘devotee’ here, and ‘māher’ as ‘home’ rather than ‘maternal home’. The use of ‘māher’ indicates a level of intimacy and safety beyond a regular ‘home’. 60 kān-phunklā normally used for bad things—rumour, etc…, here the meaning is positive. Puṇdalīk is the original devotee of viṭṭhala, in whose stead all saints have followed. 61 Amraoti/Amaravati is traditionally seen as the city of Indra, the ‘immortal’ city. Indra is Arjun’s divine father. 62 An onomatopoeia signifying the sound of torrential rain. 63 Sister-in-law: Balrām’s or Krishna’s wife—she is asking for sympathy from another woman. 64 Custom for women to worship Gauri before the main wedding function, and wives are also called ‘Gauri’ as incarnations of the Devī. 65 The speaker shifts here—and it is now, presumably, the poet who speaks. 66 Rameshvar’s stone bridge, for example, is a likely reference to the southernmost point of his journey. See Allen, ‘A ProtoIndoEuropean Story’. 67 Varkaris, considered a panth of bhakti practitioners. For a good summary and description of Varkari practitioners, see Charlotte Vaudeville and Vasudha Dalmia, Myths, Saints, and Legends in Medieval India (Bombay; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 68 Ya. Na Keḷakara, Andhārātīla lāvaṇỵā: Honājī Bāḷā, Saganabhāū, Bāḷā Bahirū, Gaṅgū Haibatī, Ananta Phandī yā suprasiddha va itara kāhī śāhirāñcyā aprakāśita lāvaṇyāñcā saṅgraha (Puṇe: Padmagandhā Prakāśana, 1999), 24. 69 An example that springs to mind is the King Udayana from Harṣa’s play Ratnāvalī, or Lady of the Jewel Necklace (7 ). Udayana mentions, ‘It’s a song sung by a woman in the full bloom of her youth’ referencing a potential liaison. As cited in David Dean Shulman, More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012), 30. 70 Moropant, Moropantkrut Prakarane, Bhag 1, 13. 71 Similarly, she uses the term ‘māher’, which normally refers to a married woman’s pre-marital, maternal home. Here, the term refers to the spiritual home of devotees of Viṭhṭhal (Vishnu)—the city of Pandharpur, where Arjun goes. This also refers to the poet himself, of course, who studied in Pandharpur after being exiled from home.

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72 Carla Petievich, When men speak as women: vocal masquerade in IndoMuslim poetry (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6. 73 Anna C. Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29. 74 For more about ‘sonic surfaces’, see Sarah McNamer, ‘The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotion’, PMLA 130, no. 5 (1 October 2015): 1436, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2015.130.5.1433. 75 While I agree with Francesca Orsini, that love remained ‘more talked about rather than practiced’ given that ‘consensual marriage and economic independence before marriage’, ‘were much resisted’, I wonder if this dichotomy between discourse and practice is too rigid. It artificially separates the production of emotional expectations from practices—and a change in the latter cannot exist without the former. Nor does it account for alternative spaces where love was an ideal—outside the institution of marriage, as I mention in Chapter 5. See Francesca Orsini, Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32–33. 76 Kulkarni, for example, points out that this play pre-dates the major discourses on child-marriage and conjugality of later in the decade. See Bhimrao Kulkarni, ‘Saubhdracha Abhyas’, in Sangit Saubhadra, 4th ed. (Pune: Snehavardhan Publishing House, 2007), 17. 77 The play-poem Vatsala Haran was one of the many plays within the abduction genre, along with Draupadī Vastra-Haraṇ (literally, The Abduction of Draupadi’s Clothing), and the archetypal Sītā Haraṇ, or Abduction of Sita. See Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi, 27. 78 Kulkarni, ‘Saubhdracha Abhyas’, 14–15. 79 Shanta Gokhale, Playwright at the Centre: Marathi Drama from 1843 to the Present (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000). 80 Vi. Pā̃ Dāṇḍekara, Marāṭhī nāṭyasr̥ shṭi (Baḍodẽ: Viśvanātha Pāṇḍuraṅga Dāṇḍekara, 1941), 195–196, https://dds.crl.edu/crldelivery/24787. 81 Baḷavant Kirloskar, Sangit Saubhadra, ed. Kulkarni, Bhimrao, 4th ed. (Pune: Snehavardhan Publishing House, 2007), 28.: ‘mī kumār tīhi kumārī astānnā jāgī ekā / vāḍhlo kheḷalo preme priya jhālo ekmekāṁ / varil tī subhadrā majalā hā niścay sarvāṁ lokāṁ’. 82 Sripad Krishna Kolhatkar, ‘Sangit Saubhadra’, Vividh Dyan Vistaar 34, no. 8–9 (September 1903): 243. 83 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘manly Englishman’ and the Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Padma Anagol-McGinn, ‘The Age of Consent Act (1891) Reconsidered: Women’s Perspectives and Participation in the Child-Marriage Controversy in India’, South Asia Research 12, no. 2 (1 November 1992): 100–118, https:// doi.org/10.1177/026272809201200202, accessed 10 October 2012; Padma Anagol, ‘Agency, Periodisation and Change in the Gender and Women’s History of Colonial India’, Gender & History 20, no. 3 (November 2008): 603–627, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.2008.00539.x, accessed 26 April 2016.

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206 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India   84 For more about the Rukmabai case, see Meera Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (Ranikhet; New Delhi: Permanent Black; Distributed by Orient Longman, 2007); Feldhaus, Images of Women in Maharashtrian Society; Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005).   85 Mahadev Govind Ranade, Religious and Social Reform: A Collection of Essays and Speeches, ed. M.B. Kolasker (Bombay: Gopal Narayen, 1902). See especially the introduction and relevant chapters.   86 ‘Hope’ here translates from āśā—but I could have, perhaps, also translated it as ‘faith’ given the context.  87 Kirloskar, Sangit Saubhadra, 33.   88 Ibid., 42.   89 Ibid., 44.   90 Ibid., 45–48. I find Subhadra’s accusation of Revati striking when compared with SP—Kirloskar has made both Balrām and Revati into antagonists, rather than just Balrām. This parallels well with Krishna’s constant and successful attempts at frustrating Balrām. Both Krishna and his sister, Subhadra are shown to contradict their brother and sister-in-law.   91 Ibid., 48.   92 Ibid., 43.   93 In yet another scene, Subhadra expresses her anger to Rukmini, and retells Rukmini of her own past—in which Krishna had abducted her from her despised betrothed. See Kirloskar, 51. Perhaps the sister-in-law from SP is Rukmini?   94 Kulkarni, ‘Saubhdracha Abhyas’, 45.   95 Ibid., 28, 42, 64.  96 In 1903, however, Kolhatkar also takes offense to such a portrayal of Krishna.   97 I wonder, for example, about this play against a recent film such as Rab ne Bana di Jodi (2008). What if Subhadra had wanted to marry Duryodhan, wouldn’t the overall narrative still have to find a way for her to marry Arjun? Wouldn’t Krishna’s līlā make that match anyway?  98 Shankar Bapuji Mujumdar, Bhaurao Kolhatkar Yanche Charitra (Pune: Dyanprakash Chchapkhana, 1901), 8.   99 In between these two, Malharrao Gaekwad, was deposed. 100 Mujumdar, Bhaurao Kolhatkar Yanche Charitra, 9–10. 101 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 6. 102 Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation, 32–42. 103 I think the narrative of Marathi theatre is far more complicated than a simple, ‘Marathi theater came into its own as a modern form of entertainment largely by shedding all that was seemingly coarse and uncouth from its performative history.’ See Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 82–93. 104 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi, 99. See note.

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105 Kulkarni, 99–100. Nagasara = instrument played by snake charmers; pāhāḍī = hilly; nakhre-bāj = the kinds of gesture associated with female dance, in which the female performer acts coy, it also refers to musical ornamentation—like trills, for example; climbed = capable of going very high; pleasant = su-svar; enchanting = mohak; dear = priya; nāc-baiṭhaks = spaces where women performed to a male audience, sometimes with sexual transactions; natya-sangita = theatre music. 106 Manorma Sharma, Music India (New Delhi: A.P.H. Publ. Corp., 1999), 152. Chib, for example, writes, ‘It is called Pahadi because this conforms to popular melodies in the Himalayan region … where this is performed as a folk song.’ See Satyendra Krishen Sen Chib, Companion to North Indian Classical Music (Dew Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publ., 2004), 220. 107 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London [u.a.]: Routledge, 2011), 102–103. Amusingly enough, even as Schneider writes about time and the archive, she misses the opportunity to connect her work to Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘Chronotope’: ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’. Bakhtin’s description of ‘time’ and flesh is eerily and intimately similar to Schneider’s own use. He writes, ‘In the literary and artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.’ Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 84. 108 Paul de Man, as cited in Jonathan D. Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 2015, 35. 109 M.S. Kanade and Tryambaka Narayana Sathe, Marathi rangabhumica ushahkala; kirloskara nataka mandalice vyacasthapaka Kai. Tryambakarava Sathe yamni anubhavalela (Pune: Vhinasa Buka Stôla, 1968), 101–117. 110 I have provided a full translation of his advice in the Appendix. 111 Vasant Shantaram Desai, ed., Vishrabdha Sharada, vol. 2 (Mumbai: H.V. Bhate Prakashan, 1975), 22–23. 112 Kumud Mehta, English Drama on the Bombay Stage in the Late Eighteenth Century and in the Nineteenth Century: A Thesis Submitted to the University of Bombay for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts (Bombay, 1960), 225–226, 247. 113 See Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text, no. 25/26 (1 January 1990): 56–80, https://doi.org/10.2307/466240, accessed 30 October 2014. 114 Schneider, Performing Remains, 105. 115 See for example, Mariano Siskind, ‘The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global. A Critique of World Literature’, Comparative Literature 62, no. 4 (2010): 336–360. Jonathon Culler, in a parallel vein, asks why the study of poetry has declined. See ‘Introduction, in Culler, Theory of the Lyric. 116 Michael Holquist and Walter Reed, ‘Six Theses on the Novel, and Some Metaphors’, New Literary History 11, no. 3 (1980): 413, https://doi. org/10.2307/468935, accessed 12 May 2016.

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208 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 117 This is a sentiment often expressed, but rarely put into practice in South Asia. For example, Francesca Orsini, in critiquing Casanova, also mentions that other genres are more relevant to South Asia, some extensively studied, such as the short story, others less so. See Francesca Orsini, ‘India in the Mirror of World Fiction’, New Left Review, no. 13 (February 2002): 75–88. 118 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). See especially his third chapter.

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5 HETEROGENEOUS WORLDS: THE FARCE AGAINST DRAMA Laughter destroyed epic distance; it began to investigate man freely and familiarly, to turn him inside out, expose the disparity between his surface and his center, between his potential and his reality. —M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Far from Śakuntalā’s classical world of chariots racing through the sky, the farce hunts other elusive and illusory beasts. The farcical world is grounded, and its prey lurks in the rhythms and cycles that structure everyday experience. Unlike music drama, the 19thcentury Marathi farce evinces the most intimacy with the social world or rather evinces a paradigm of representation that we (today) find intimate. It retains a point of view that portrays the subjects of its representations within a zone of contact (to borrow a Bakhtinian phrase) that is often direct and crude, and certainly not allegorical.1 The farce’s (often intrusive) proximity to the social world has been one of its most enduring legacies for Marathi literature and has been part of the way scholarly understanding about the farce has also developed. S.N. Banhatti had already identified the key elements of the farcical world in the first advertisement for a farce, dating to 12 January 1856: In the advertisement from the Vartaman Dipika [Light on the Present], of the adjectives applied to the farce, ‘hasnyajogaa’ [befitting laughter] means, in common parlance, ‘vinodi’ [humorous, droll]. ‘Useful to the people’ means ‘having a social form’ or ‘reflecting the everyday life’, that is ‘not of the Puranas.’ From these two words we get an interpretation of the farce. ‘Farce means a not-Puranic and vinodi-form play.’2

The purpose of this chapter is to partially examine this recalcitrant definition and to see more precisely what ‘utility’ and ‘useful’ means for 19th-century Marathi theatre and our understanding today. What were the topics of social value that it covered? And how were they portrayed differently from the other performance genres covered in 209

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this book? How did the inner world of the theatre present an abstracted but important rejoinder to the outer world, remaking those discourses through performance? How did it appeal to audiences and to which audiences did it appeal? And most of all, what kind of dialogue existed between genres? The farce contains the most textured, variegated representation of daily life in Maharashtra from the 19th century. Some of its repeated topics are found almost nowhere else—travel by steamboat, for example—while others, such as conjugal relations, are the basis for much scholarly literature and the topic of many literary and performative interventions. In this chapter, following a brief discussion of the purported ‘newness’ of the farce, I am interested in three topics as they are explored in the farce: women’s daily evening temple rituals, travel by steamboat and parody of other performance genres. All three contain some overlapping moments in the farces I analyse as well as in other farces from the repertoire, and I draw out these connections throughout the chapter, but my main approach to these three topics is not to document their frequency. Rather, I approach them through a diverse array of methodologies that I find suited to their content, and which breathe life into the quirky, nonsense plots. In the first case—daily evening prayers and the way playwrights ‘discuss’ them—de Certeau’s ideas about practice and everyday life inform my analysis, while Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Parody (1985) similarly enriches the multiple kinds of parody witnessed by audiences in these farces. With the farce about steamboat travel, Bakhtin’s narrative zone of contact becomes Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ and social mixture helps to enlarge and leaven the represented and representable social world.3

THE FARCE AND ITS PURPORTED NEWNESS The farce and farcical representation of the 19th century presents many conundrums and opportunities for research. While it has been assumed to be a ‘new’ genre on account of the ways in which it represents society (roughly through a ‘realist’ paradigm), there has been little attention paid to its specific performative contexts. The earliest use of the term ‘farce’ appears in an advertisement that S.N. Banhatti speaks about above. The term is directly transliterated into the Bālabodh (modified Devanagari) script, in which Marathi is currently written. However, later theatre advertisements often contained the word prahasan as well—a term describing comic drama in classical India.4 While Marathi dictionaries do not list either term until the early–mid-20th century

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(by which time both farce and prahasan have separate definitions, with a large overlap),5 the dictionary accounts make it difficult to relate formal terminologies between Sanskrit, Marathi and English, let alone account for their spoken usage. These overlapping usages and translations point towards the constant negotiation between cosmopolitan and vernacular literary ecologies, as I mentioned in the Introduction. Although the term prahasan was not fully defined in Marathi dictionaries before the 20th century, it was certainly written on wall posters nearly simultaneously as farce and equated with farce soon after performances began.6 At the same time, these labels—farce and prahasan—hide the content of the performances in two significant ways. In the first, as Stuart Blackburn has noted with novelistic fiction from the 19th century, we need to more carefully examine the sources and tropes used by playwrights in the 19th century in relation to earlier Indian literatures, some of which may even be poetic.7 Many farces were based on historical povāḍās (ballads), for example, and yet others have (purportedly) been drawn for the Arabian Nights. Given some of the representations of elderly husbands and younger wives and mischief around the temple, their tropes may also draw on older Sanskrit satire—not directly, but thematically. Lee Siegel, for example, points out several instances of the temple as a site of humour and satire in ancient India.8 Such resonances and inter-generic influences make the claim to farcical ‘newness’ at least a little dubious. Furthermore, and secondly, the claims to newness also need to be understood in relation to farcical representation. Often considered ‘new’ for its realist representation, ‘realism’ and its ‘un-Puranic’ nature has rarely been interrogated. What I am interested in most is the way the idiom of these farces seems textured and attentive to colloquial speech. Distinctions between brahman and non-brahman speech patterns, the use of idiomatic expressions, vulgarity and attentiveness to what appear to be 19th-century concerns: stylistically and thematically, these indicate rapport between the inner world of the farce, the mode of its telling and the outer world beyond the performance. In the other kinds of performance genres examined in this book, there are other indications of moments where the mode of telling and the outside world converged in an intimate way—primarily through improvisation and intellectual culture—but there are few recorded moments, and much more research needs to be done in this vein.9 Generally, though not exclusively, these moments of convergence arose through direct address, at the beginnings of performances, in conversations between the sūtradhār and vidūṣak, and also when actors improvised their lines. Not to mention performance genres such as tamāśā, usually unscripted in the 19th century and earlier, and considered realist from its incipience. Even when texts were written, as Novetzke has argued

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with the genre of kīrtan, ‘literacy [was] subservient to performance’ and writing was ‘seen as a tool, a carefully contained tool, in the practice of performance’.10 In this performative context, the farce does something quite remarkable: it applies pressure to the culture of performance by articulating an intimate social world on the page and stage itself, rather than creating it in process and the unwritten, performed aporia of the text. In digressing from the play script, and improvising or directly addressing the audience, the integrity of representation in other genres is broken, thus opening up a realm of ‘real’ intervention by breaking the fourth wall. The farce, by contrast, does not seem to break that wall and seems (slightly) more resistant to that real-time intervention, instead of relying on textual strategies that mimic the world outside the theatre.11

LIVED IMMANENCE: HOW TO READ A CIRCULAR NARRATIVE In the farces examined here, I am mainly interested in the texts themselves, but also in some of the unwritten spaces where performance vies with the text. Some of these farces document quotidian practices while also mocking them; others describe modes of travel and social mixture, and there is some parody in the farces I examine as well. In the first farce, A Farce about Women Enchanted by a Story (1884; unknown author), I write about the way temples and koṭhas (whorehouses) are practised spaces.12 Practice restructures those spaces for the practitioners, changes their relationship to those spaces and also subverts their intended use—at least for the temples. Historically, temples were spaces where ‘confidences were shared and gossip exchanged, and female solidarities formed and sustained’ among neighbourhood women, writes Meera Kosambi.13 Recent work has also shown the role of wealthy women in temple patronage.14 Women Enchanted by a Story can be seen as containing residues of these practices (albeit on a more modest scale), which we may subject to a simple process of reading against the grain, revealing social realism, rather than objects of ridicule as the farcical genre suggests. All practices demonstrate the ways in which the principal characters suspend their normative social roles and engage in varying degrees of ‘misuse’, thus refashioning those spaces to gain a momentary tactical advantage, creating a mode of lived immanence.15 By the end, all socially threatening activities have been contained and order is restored. I offer a way to read a circular plot that registers such socially disruptive activities, one that does not privilege a narrative politics of change or progress in a character’s social condition.

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Women Enchanted by a Story is about two women who are captivated by a kīrtankār a performer who performs kīrtan, a genre of performative storytelling that interlaces sermon with the story being told who insists on attending his daily evening recitations in addition to performing religious service or sevā.16 Yamunā Bāī is the protagonist of the farce while Sālū Bāī and an aunt encourage or discourage her (bāī or ‘lady’ indicates respectability). The kīrtankār represents an object of desire, located within the temple space. Salū Bāī is widowed and the Aunt’s exact relationships are unclear. The dynamic between them, however, is crystal clear: Salū Bāī is an instigator who somewhat ambivalently refers to herself as a ‘willful unshorn widow’; the aunt is a figure of social conservatism and cautions Yamunā, who is clearly impressionable.17 Yamunā’s husband Vinayak Rao is accommodating and indulges his wife’s whims but is unaware of Sālū’s influence over Yamunā. He also has his reasons for being so indulgent. A similar tripartite structure of social relations is implicit in male homosociality as well even as the topic of the play is women. At the beginning of the play, Yamunā and Sālū are speaking in Yamunā’s chāḷa or kind of housing with some shared facilities. Sālū suggests that Yamunā accompany her to a different temple that evening because the kīrtankār there is more accomplished.18 Sālū leaves moments after planting this seed in Yamunā’s mind despite the aunt’s discouragement. Later, Sālū has prepared dinner for some śeṭhjī, a businessman who presumably is her landlord or caretaker given that she is a widow, but he is late. She dispenses with her responsibility of serving him, leaves the dinner out and goes to pick up Yamunā, who also quickly serves her husband before leaving with Sālū. They arrive at the Viṭhobā temple a little late and the ritual aspects are already complete, indicating that the actual time of worship is over.19 Furthermore, it seems as though the kīrtankār’s story is hardly what interests them: they are both taken by his appearance. The next day and for two months afterwards, both go to his house regularly to perform sevā or service, unbeknownst to Yamunā’s husband or the aunt. At some point, the aunt does figure things out and saves the reputations of both ladies from ruin. The farce ends with a mock kīrtan through which kīrtankārs are lambasted as frauds. In many ways, this farce demonstrates a kind of conservatism through its circular narrative structure, precluding actual ‘change’. At the same time, it also portrays women who transform their social worlds through spatial practices that do not register on the metric of ‘change’ in their social position. If ‘change’ relies on freeing characters of their erstwhile ‘positionality’ for the ‘better’, what can one say of the experiences gained along the circular narrative? Do

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characters forget? Indeed, do we, as readers and spectators, forget our experience? How do we understand actions that are no longer part of our routine practice? The women’s actions are akin to de Certeau’s tactics of the weak, in which the winnings cannot be accumulated, in which the kind of change that seems crucial for a progressive narrative cannot be realised. Consequently, their lives are bound up in a form of lived immanence.20 The playwright expects these practices—gossipmongering and going to the temple for the wrong reasons—to be the butt of humour. But actual historical practices reveal temples as sites where women express horizontal solidarities. Daily tasks and activities are transformed through actual practice, which involves a renegotiation of meanings and affective attachments. Sālū informs Yamunā of a new kīrtankār. The old one, Sālū says, ‘He is so old. You say the story is good in Rām temple, but what kind of story is that? The kīrtankār is so old, and then his recitation, even that’s not good, so what’s so good about that [Rām Temple]?’21 Sālū causes Yamunā to become aware—of both the explicit body of the performer as well as the mode of address—and thus to perceive differences between kīrtans and kīrtankārs. In essence, Sālū makes Yamunā a desiring subject and also awakens her to the pleasure of connoisseurship and spectatorship. The temple defies our contemporary expectations and bears a striking resemblance to a kothā.22 Indeed, in Marathi, the rhyme cannot be ignored: the women are enchanted by a kathā (story), while the husband goes to a kothā. The temple is a place where both Sālū and Yamunā fantasise about the kinds of husbands they would like to have rather than those they do have. From being a place of religious worship, the meanings of kīrtan and what constitutes a ‘good’ kīrtan are reworked to include spectacle and desire for the performer; in short, it is reworked to be easy on the physical eyes, not just the mind’s eye. Sālū describes, ‘O! What his foot-stepping gait! Handsome too. And what a sway to his pagaḍī…’ to which Yamunā responds, ‘True, this is a thousand times better than Ram Temple, and I agree with you. If we are to have husbands, then they should be like him. Unlike mine, with his broken pagḍī hanging, and bringing only twenty paltry rupees from the office … at least he should have looks? But not even that!’23 Temples have been turned from places of worship into spaces for voyeurism. From the initial seed planted in her mind, Yamunā now processes the desire by giving it a definite form: it has been labelled and is comprised of some desire for material betterment, some physical desire, but also one expressing affective dispositions— gait, sway—perhaps desiring a kind of confidence? The Viṭhobā temple thus becomes a practised affective space, whose accessibility

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easily occludes the fact that Yamunā has not fully understood what her behaviours entail: ‘The change is an impact lived on the body before anything is understood, and it is simultaneously meaningful and ineloquent,’ in Berlant’s words, rather than one perceptible in the social world.24 Caught up in the action, there is even a moment where both women whisper in each other’s ears, avoiding the audience, undoubtedly a canny choice on the playwright’s part that only adds to the horizontal intimacy expressed by the two women, importantly excluding the audience and reader from their machinations, unlike Subhadra from the previous chapter, who sings for the audience.25 As a result of this awakening, Yamunā transforms the kīrtankār into an object of desire, and the temple into a site where that desire can be fulfilled. And yet, these moments of disrupted and reworked affective attachment are not unlike those that men experience in kothās: men visit each other’s houses without their wives’ knowledge as does Yamunā’s husband. They too have their own houses of worship. ‘After eating [Yamunā’s husband] leaves, and [she’d] be lucky if he returned in the morning … he definitely doesn’t like stories! Kothāsongs, kothā-programs, these kinds of things interest him,’ says Sālū to the kīrtankār one day, reminding us of the nāc-baiṭhaks of the previous chapter.26 While the play text does not provide more details about men’s lives, these few are salient details that implicate men and women in similar behaviours and affective practices of gazing and forming horizontal solidarities. Both take place in the evenings after meals, suggesting a routinised escape from ‘normal’ social relations. In some senses, the kind of triangulation implicit in this play is consistent with the way Sedgwick understands relations within restoration drama: while there is a figure of desire upon whom women or men focus their attention (the kīrtankār at the temple or a courtesan in the kotha), the ultimate aim of the interaction is to reinforce homosocial interactions and affective ties.27 How else shall we read the women’s furtive exchanges at the temple? The audience, contemporary readers and men have been subtly excluded. While the farce, qua farce, may seek to elicit humour from these practices, our reading may instead take pleasure in the subversions—and perhaps there were a few audiences who, likewise, saw profit in such humour rather than the malice of mockery. Sālū and Yamunā’s behaviours undergird yet another relation to devotional practices outside the theatre. The kīrtankār is not merely an enchanter but a representative of bhakti devotional traditions, at least in this farce. On two separate occasions, the text mentions that he performs and plies his trade at the Viṭhobā Mandir and

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not Rām Mandir. Viṭhobā, or Viṭṭhala, has long been regarded as a manifestation of Vishnu in the vārkarī, bhakti traditions of Maharashtra and Karnataka.28 He is the focus of annual pilgrimages to the city of Pandharpur, and bhakti worship often privileges religious devotion (often represented erotically) over ritual practice. Thus, the genre of kīrtan performed at the Viṭhobā Mandir is also of interest: the attractive itinerant performer performs lāvaṇīs or ballads of love and seduction!29 He himself is surprised by Yamunā’s attendance and in their very first conversation asks Sālū, who is also present, ‘How is it that her husband is on the bhakti path? Or is he one of these recently reformed?’30 Implicit in these few comments, one realises that bhakti had specific caste and perhaps gender connotations. In an article about the bhakti codes available to wives, Malhotra writes, The dharmic injunctions for the wife were less amenable to complete overhauling [than a courtesan], as she was assessed and placed in her role as the sexual and social partner to her husband. Though shaken, destabilized, and at times brought to the brink, sexual codes operative for the wife were never really violated in totality.31

That is, bhakti was a form of practised and controlled devotional infidelity (based on Radha’s love of Krishna), accessible to married women, though not completely transgressive of their social positions. Furthermore, the specific language of ‘reform’ and its connotations with Western-educated upper-caste men, especially those who sought to distance ritual in favour of bhakti’s devotionalism cannot be understated. Religious tracts and discussions in the 19th century compared Krishna (and Bhakti) worship with Christ worship in order to locate a less-ritually oriented philosophy of love, divinity and grace within Hinduism.32 These sought to elevate bhakti traditions and portray them as offering anti-ritual modern practices within Hinduism.33 The kīrtankār’s question and his religious inclinations thus become part of a microcosm of social and political formulations; audiences in the theatre would have been attentive to such layered concerns, and this farce clearly foregrounds an interpretation of the emerging socio-religious climate. Towards the end of the farce, the aunt re-enters, worried about Yamunā’s overly pious sevā of the kīrtankār, and the rumour of disrepute that has developed over the previous several months—the neighbours have begun to gossip. The narrative implications of Yamunā’s actions finally overtake her actual practice at this precise moment—the farce hangs by a thread, will it snap and descend into melodrama

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or tragedy? No, the aunt’s comments on the matter serve to make Yamunā fully conscious of what meanings are actually associated with her actions. They certainly are not immanent in the action itself, but overdetermined by social cues. Her ‘vitalising’ behaviour thus vanishes into the background as Yamunā learns that there is nothing outside her social world and that her attempts to escape the confines of her habitus can only be sustained for a short while, eluding social meaning for only so long before her social world cannibalises all intention and meaning in her actions. She lives perfectly in Berlant’s cruelly optimistic moment of suspension: Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing towards a mode of lived immanence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons why people…choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it.34

Yamunā’s relation to their social world is held in abeyance, syncopation and ultimately reconciled. However, solidarities have been exchanged, desires have been experienced, and yet they cannot be stockpiled or accumulated, as is the case with de Certeau’s tactics, weapons of the weak. They maintain an attachment to the object—the kīrtan and the kīrtankār—in advance of its loss, despite knowing that it could pose a potential threat to their (social) being.35 In questioning the way kīrtankārs and other itinerant poets ply their trade, this farce also speaks to the conflicting ways in which saints or saintly figures have been defined in South Asia. There is more than an abundance of false prophets, and these figures often become essential elements in narratives. For example, Arjun from the Arjun–Subhadra episode discussed in Chapter 4 instantiates a positive version of demagoguery as does Ranjha from the Hir–Ranjha narrative in the Punjabi qissa tradition as Farina Mir points out.36 Other contemporary sources also attest to figures of the false saint as a trope in fiction. Muktamala (1867), considered one of the first Marathi novels, also contains a scene early in its narrative where the chief antagonist employs someone to pose as a wandering holy man to entice and capture the heroine Muktamala. It succeeds. Worshippers even approach him and refer to him as a buvā.37 Such portrayals are not unique to the 19th century and both the popular and scholarly literature more than adequately describe (and decry) false prophets and Indian Tartuffes.38

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CONTACT ZONES UNINCORPORATED, BEYOND BRAHMANS Other spaces are markedly different and contain microcosms from less frequent but no less powerfully felt realities. Boat of Tears or a Farce about Steamboats (1895; Keshav Vaman Pethe) describes the tribulations of people who travel between Bombay and various towns on the Konkan coast. All action is set in the village of Dhaboli, some 200 km south of Bombay.39 A steady stream of people migrated from various towns along the Konkan coast to Bombay from the mid-19th century onwards. Some were indeed labourers who flocked to the mills, while others were from traditionally literate castes in search of administrative and bureaucratic posts.40 At the same time, there is hardly any literature on migration or transport via steamboat within India, especially given the affinities between certain brahman groups that came to dominate the intelligentsia in Bombay and Pune, and the Konkan region.41 Steamboats attests to migration by describing situations central to modernity, namely, the unavoidability of social mixture, the hastening of time and new standards of authorisation such as ticketing. The steamboat functions as a colonial-era ‘contact zone’ akin to a train, in which technology is a vehicle that upsets social barriers.42 The farce carries forth these themes as they affect people on different stages of the journey—nearing disembarkation on the boat itself, at the wharf, at the ticket office, at the house of one passenger and a public eating-house—and each scene has an entirely different cast of characters whose lives have become pandemoniums. The most significant aspect of this farce is the humiliating, tit-for-tat world of everyday interactions. There is no reconciliation nor narrative return here: by the end of the farce, we gain a full sense of gustatory disappointment, visceral disgust, as well as anger, insult and violence— at the expense of upper-caste families. To better organise this farce, I have created Table 5.1 below. Given that there is little narrative, the table provides an overview of content in each scene, the important themes and related sensory data provided in the farce itself. A cursory glance gives us a sense of why this farce is super-titled the ‘Boat of Tears’. Nearly every scene contains some form of misfortune, stress, or anxiety about the boat.

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Location

While disembarking

On the boat

On the wharf

Ticket office

House of Govindpant

Public eating house

Scene

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

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Description of undercooked meals

Preparations for travel

Display of corruption

Bags accidentally exchanged, two parties accuse each other of robbery

People fall into the water, boat rocks, mockery of Gayatri mantra

Vomit, shuffling, drunkenness, punching, smoking, stepping on toes

What happens

Table 5.1: List of episodes, their associated themes and emotional scripting

Timeliness, social mixture, gustatory disappointment

Domestic life, time and scheduling

Cooking the books

Social mixture

Interrogation of ‘progress’, social mixture

Social mixture, violence

Themes

Sexual innuendo, disgust, anger, anxiety, disgust

Abuse of servants, anger, sorrow, confusion

Dishonesty, some sexual innuendo

Anxiety, loss, insult, disgust

Offence, insult, bodily violence, pain

Disgust, pain, cruelty, anxiety, sexual innuendo

Sensory/emotional world

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Reading all these events on the page, it is tempting to imagine the way they would have been staged—and indeed how the purported misery of the characters would have been received by the different audiences within the theatre. I have translated a large part of the first scene at length to demonstrate some of the more colourful aspects of this farce and develop some of its themes further: First Sailor: Dabhol Passengers! Dabhol! Second: Dabhol Passengers ! (yells loudly) Third: (looking back and forth, loudly) Any passengers for Dabhol? Take your baggage in your hands. Come to this side. (People begin to get up) Elderly Woman: O Chandri, get up now. You want to go to your ājola, no?43 How she looks after vomiting so much! Widow: Ugh! Mathubai (presumably the elderly woman), your daughter is so covered with vomit—at least wipe it off. Elderly woman: Ew ew ew ew! Ram Ram! I don’t like this boat travel! (She wipes, the steamboat whistles thrice) Chandri: Mother, are we at Dabhol? Elderly Woman: Here now! Finally free of these containers! All day, I didn’t get one moment of peace. Widow: How could you? That carcass shinor or phinor44 was sitting at my back, constantly stretching out his legs over me! Smoking a bidi, that slave blew smoke on me. Sick! What a [gross] mouth, of that carcass! Every now and then, he ate pieces of fish, drank liquor and that carcass said, ‘Bammin ma’am, ya want some?’ Mathubai, seeing that made me queasy. I just lay my head slack over my sack. Elderly Woman: It’s the English rule, so what he does is right.45 Chandri: He who soaks in sin, is one of the steamboat kin. Elderly Woman: Well, that’s good! Now we won’t ever sit in this steamboat again. Sadashiv, what are you staring at? Take the bags. Get up! (Just as she says this, it gets busy. People move forward pushing each other) Widow: O Sadu, please get up…46 … Sailor: Departing passengers stand up. Remaining passengers sit down. Come from the left side. Chandri: Ayayayayaya ha, ouch ayayay, mom! Widow: Chandri dear, what happened? Move forward. Chandri: That carcass—I was dragging the sack and he was at my back the whole time so I stopped and that [XXXX] may his gross hands burn! His body is so dirty! Ewww! (Spits)

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Widow: Well, what to do now, be quiet. When I was resting my head on the sack, that slave said, ‘Look at those bracelets!’ Just because nobody says anything—is that why it’s like this? Sadashiv: Arrrrrrrrr! That fucker/imbecile stepped on my foot with his boots! Now it’s even bleeding. Donkey! Have your eyes popped? My feet are dying! And are now polluted! Shinor: Why are you cursing? Donkey-pig man! Sadashiv: Cunt! You’re the one who stepped on my feet, and cursing me now? Shinor: Who are you? Do I have eyes on my back? Sadashiv: Burn your eyes, slave! Drunk! You sway and totter. Where’s the purity in you slaves! As soon as we get off, I’ll mention you to the sahib! Shinor: Think about it. You curse, you curse, you curse? Sadashiv: yeah, yeah, I do. Who are you, surely not some Bajirao! Step on my feet, ruin them! [XXXX]47 Shinor: Go, complain! (Punches him twice in the face)48 …

There are several things that are omitted in translation here—the language of the sailors and the shinor is half Marathi and half Hindi, and secondly, the spaces marked ‘XXXX’ are given as such in the text as well, indicating (perhaps) improvised cursing. More importantly, these few lines contain a microcosm of social and historical detail. We see the interactions between brahmans and other castes—just as the elderly woman complains about how the onset of English rule has disrupted caste hierarchies, so too we see a Mahar who later mocks two brahman men in the second scene.49 We also notice the arrogance of a young brahman boy Sadashiv and the kinds of degradation to which he and his family members submit others simply through their use of words such as melā, a particularly feminine insult indicating ‘dead’ and therefore rotten. So too with the word gulām meaning ‘slave’ generally and more specifically, the son of a female slave. Just as the two brahman men in a later scene ask the Mahar to give them more room, here we also see an expectation of distance, even though they are all literally in the same (crowded) boat. New technologies, such as the steamboat make social mixture largely unavoidable, but these mixtures come with discourses of purity and pollution, obvious revulsion for social others and nostalgia for a precolonial past that was more attentive to brahman interests. At the same time, we also see some ‘corrective measures’ throughout the farce—the shinor does not put up with Sadashiv and the Mahar from the second scene mocks the Gayatri mantra (in words I haven’t been able to translate).50

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In the third scene, two brahmans accidentally exchange bags with another fellow. They take his and break the lock to open it, only to discover that it contains implements to shave and cure hide, some fish and three rupees. The shaving and curing implements indicate that the fellow is, presumably, a Mang and a barber. They are shocked and disgusted, both because of the content, and also because they could lose the 500 rupees that they had in their own bag. They quickly discard the items somewhere along the wharf. When the time for exchange comes, the fellow named Dājī creates a scene. I have added my interpretive straight brackets in the translation below: Morbhat: [panicking] What now? Any clues? Govind: Our bag went with this guy, and his is with us. Morbhat: Give his to him, and take ours from him. Daji: Take this here your bag, give ours wherever it is. Morbhat: Please don’t speak so loudly. Daji: Why? Is there a theft? Wherever it is, give it to me. Morbhat: Take yours, there it is (points a finger). Give ours here. Daji: [exasperated] Big man, who told you to break the lock of our bag? I had my three rupees in that, I’ll see if they are still there. Morbhat: (to Govind) Govinda, what kind of nonsense is all this— take a look. Daji: No way! These are Bammins here? Say—why’d you pick my sack? What? Even spilt the fish, what’s this? Morbhat: [Even more panicked] Shh! Shh! Don’t speak so loudly! Daji: [getting angry] You took my money and say don’t speak loud! Are you gonna give it back or not, or should I tell the police? Morbhat: [conciliatory] O Man, we didn’t take your money. Govind: [conciliatory] Daji-ji, we only opened his bag so we can see who the owner is. Daji: [sarcastically] Sure! Good one, sir! You broke the lock, ate the fish and the flatbread. Morbhat: Daji-ji please don’t speak so loudly. Daji: [angrily] Why not? You ate my fish and flatbread. That’s fine, but I want my three rupees back, or else! Are you gonna give them or not? (starts shouting and people gather) Fakruddin: The Biramin’s ate the barber’s fish! (spits and laughs)51

Here, the poor barber is able to successfully mobilise those around him, and draw attention to the situation. The two brahmans pay a hefty sum for their disgust (evident even in the way they point to Daji’s bag rather than hand it to him): with Fakruddin as witness and arbiter in the quarrel, they pay the Daji sixty rupees, out of which Fakruddin

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claims five for his arbitration. Much like the earlier scene, when Sadashiv speaks with more than a little condescension and arrogance, with this scene, the threat of violence is the threat of the crowd that has gathered—presumably in support of Daji. The two brahmans wish to avoid a scene—precisely because the loyalties of the crowd will lie with the barber. The social mixture here, as above, indicates that the sentiments of the crowd are decidedly suspicious and intolerant of the arrogance evinced by brahmans, who lie about why they opened the bag in the first place. While brahman characters see these situations as a clear fall from their erstwhile supremacy under Peshwa rule when they would not have had to mix, they are also cognisant of their new social reality and complacency in (and responsibility for) the colonial enterprise: in another scene, when one complains about how the English took ‘our Vedas’ his friend replies, ‘But isn’t it our people who teach them?’52

MUSIC, IN JEST Humiliation and violence in addition to satire, such as with Women Enchanted by a Story, are not the only ways in which farces captured the social world. Parody too was important.53 By far my favourite in the collection, Musical Confusion (1888) by Haribhau brilliantly captures the craze of music-drama (saṅgīt nāṭak) in the latter half of the 19th century.54 To be sure, Musical Confusion is unlike the former two farces in that it imitates the formal qualities of music drama in addition to satirising music drama’s social consequences. Broken into two scenes, first within a household and another in the marketplace, this farce parodies the use of music in elaborating both trivial details and emotionally heightened moments in music drama. At the same time that it parodies a genre, it simultaneously satirises the way music drama has pervaded social relations and various private and public spaces. That is, it functions both as a parody of an emergent artistic form and social satire. In the first case of parody, it distinctly asks the reader (in my case) and the spectator (in the 19th-century case), to think about the text/performance in the foreground as well as the genre of musicdrama in the background, relying on the receiver’s understanding of the formal elements in both cases. It is not merely a formal exercise in comparison (it is not value-neutral) and has an evaluative function, relying on the audience’s ability to decode contents from the inner worlds of the theatre in reference to the outer worlds of society. Musical Confusion begins with an explanatory conversation between the husband and wife, in which the wife nonchalantly says she’ll

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inform the kitchen maid to make musical fried dumplings and musical vegetables: … Bhakkampant (Husband): O how can dumplings become musical? Malini (Wife): Why not? Shakuntala, as a human, became musical! Bhakkampant: but that’s because songs were composed for her! Malini: In the same way then! For my vegetables, rice, lentils, chutneys, sambhars, curries, relishes—I’ll sing to them so they too will become musical. Just as listening to the song in drama enraptures the mind, so when these go into the stomach and sing, they will be even more enjoyable. Bhakkampant: What grand thoughts! … Dear, we watch Dushyanta and Shakuntala under the bower, and that vanquishes the enemies of Shankara in our bodies—will your musical food do that to us too?55 Malini: Why not? There’s a small stratagem for that. Just allow your lips a pint of musical brandy, and why just the enemies of Shankara, you’ll vanquish the enemies of the whole world in your body!56 Watching such erotic plays, who won’t find eros pervading their bodies? Even I find myself in such a situation, but what am I to do!57 …

This (rather absurdist) conversation is noteworthy for several reasons. By the time of Saṅgīt Ghotāḷā’s composition, not only had Śakuntalā become the quintessential Sanskrit play (as discussed in Chapter 3), but it had also undergone several translations and performances.58 In quite possibly the most anachronistic of all comparisons, Śakuntalā’s author Kālidāsa had been dubbed India’s Shakespeare, an unfortunate association that remained in currency well into the 20th century. In Marathi, the play was translated and performed as a music-drama Saṅgīt Śakuntal (1880) akin to opera. Saṅgīt Śakuntal’s immediate artistic consequence was twofold: it is widely acknowledged to have ushered in an era of scripted rather than improvised ‘high’ drama, in which all actors had to learn lines and recite them, maintaining faithfulness to the text. Secondly, whereas in the earlier improvised tradition, it was primarily the sūtradhār or narrator’s job to recite the verses as poetry, it is unclear to what extent music and singing was part of the recitation.59 With Kirloskar’s translation of Śakuntalā, the verse passages from the Sanskrit original were set to music; Kirloskar clearly indicated a combination of four elements for the musical performance before each verse—a rāg (or musical mode), a tāl (or beat cycle), a cāl (or melody) and metrical verse-type. I spoke about these more explicitly in the previous chapters, but for now, it is sufficient to say that during

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the 1880s, Śakuntalā was adapted for a number of different productions. Bhakkampant indicates that he is going to see ‘Paranjape’s translation’ that evening, but Kirloskar and Dongre had also translated and staged the play.60 In some ways, we may be able to argue that the play had become part of the active cultural imaginary and was ripe for all kinds of adaptations—even parody. Bhakkampant and his Malini are avid theatre enthusiasts and will go to see separate music dramas that evening—Bhakkampant, the Paranjape adaptation of Śakuntalā and Malini Saṅgīt Soubhadra, A Musical about Subhadra, which I spoke about in the previous chapter. Haribhau, the playwright, uses the popularity of music-drama to speak about the ways music had begun to pervade the social and individuated somatic world. To this end, the satire here is to transform food from its nutritional and physical qualities into a vehicle of emotional experience—joy, rapture, eros. Food generally appears in many of the farces contained in Kulkarni’s edited volume with a wide range of semantic properties. For example, food may signify womanly duties of serving her husband (as in Women Enchanted by a Story), idioms of mismatching marriage, everyday life, luxury, celebration, purity and pollution (recall the ‘fish’ above) among others. Within Musical Confusion, I suspect that Haribhau was also playing on the way metaphors for foods are ubiquitous in the aesthetics of rasa. Since the term rasa itself has been translated as ‘juice’ or ‘flavour’ or ‘taste’ and theories of rasa also often use food combinatorics to describe the aesthetic experience, this entire conversation is a satire of the new intelligentsia’s aesthetic practices and obsession with music drama. As satire, it looks outwards from itself onto the social world of the intelligentsia, represented in the example above. By contrast, the remainder of the farce describes various scenes in the kitchen, marketplace, street, at the police station and in a school, each of which contains various kinds of songs and poetic verse forms— ghazals, lāvaṇīs, diṇḍīs, āryās and sākīs—in Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Sanskrit. Thus, the text oscillates between satire and parody, imitating and playing upon the formal stylistics of genre, while also casting aspersions upon the craze of music drama in various social spaces. The scenes carry forward the action of the scene above and describe situations and moments where mundane activities have been transformed and emotionally heightened by music. The scene from the police station is particularly amusing: Thief (to the officer): brother, please don’t punch or kick me like this. Give me a musical beating. Officer (confused): Uh … what is a musical beating? Thief: I will show you by singing.

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226 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India Āryā; cāl: kolhyācī; —tāl: lāthāḍ taskarāṅmadhye asatī amūlya guṇa tīna bahu moṭhe. dravyāpahāra karaṇe āṇi vadaṇe sadaiva te khoṭe [1] ālyā śipāī paḷaṇe gaṭārātūnī na pāhaṇe koṭhe. aiśa narā sarakārī turūṅga hecī sadā gṛha moṭhe [2] Āryā: melody: of a fox; beat: kicking Among thieves, there are three big virtues doing money-business and speaking always lies Running from the police, through the sewers without looking where to such a man a government jail is always a bigger house.61

As mentioned earlier, the text of this farce plays with the formal compositional aspects of music drama. An āryā is a specific metrical composition, in which the verse is measured only with regards to the number of light and heavy syllables, and not with regards to their specific arrangement. Each line in the ārya contains a distribution of 12 total syllables before the caesura and 18 after with a verse comprised of a couplet. As Walimbe points out, this verse form was akin to the Sanskrit verse form of gītī62 and was one of the common verse forms utilised while translating the verse passages from Sanskrit drama. Haribhau retains this formalism while mocking two other constitutive elements of verse in music drama—the melody and the beat. The thief sings as melodiously as a jackal, even as he is being beaten or perhaps because he is being beaten: aḍale kolhe maṅgaḷ gāy—‘a distressed jackal sings sweetly’ and ‘pretends he is not in trouble’—so goes an old Marathi proverb.63 The thief, in distress, thus calls his captor his saviour, transforming the jail into a house and even a comfortable one. It is not clear for whom these instructions are written—readers, performers or audiences—thus making it a little difficult to connect the parody of formalism in the text to the performance. While readers of the text would immediately comprehend the parody given the arrangement on the page, we have little to indicate how far the text of Saṅgīt Ghoṭāḷā circulated. Unlike Kirloskar’s Śakuntalā, which went through nine editions in the 1880s alone, we have no such account of different editions of Saṅgīt Ghoṭāḷā.64 Similarly, how would performers translate the ‘melody of a jackal’ into actual performance? Of course, such considerations seem overshadowed by the question of audience comprehension. The number of editions of Śakuntalā, in addition to other translations that were also circulating in the theatre world, warrant an important assumption: at the very least, the audiences were knowing audiences. This is an essential element of parody: without the contextual background of prior performances and their formal

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attributes, parody would lose its ‘bitextual’ foreground: ‘If the decoder does not notice, or cannot identify, an intended allusion or quotation, he or she will merely naturalize it, adapting it to the context of the work as a whole.’65 Parody works precisely by both invoking and distancing itself from a prior work; the audience of parody needs to know both for it to be successful and for parody to function in a reflexive manner. In their capacity as knowing audiences, I suggest that Haribhau’s formal play on the page may have been spoken out loud—the thief whimpering his own canine melody as he is harshly interrogated. --In some of the aforementioned farces, we saw brief discussions of history (with regards to the Maratha Confederacy/Peshwas), caste consciousness (Mahar, Mang, brahman, shinor), gender (visiting hometowns, viewing kīrtan/viewing at the kotha), religious practices (reform, bhakti, traditional ritualistic practice) and music-drama. But these are just a few of the farces. Others contain both overlapping themes as well as different ones. Attending kīrtan every evening, while a topic of satire in Women Enchanted by a Story, is perfectly normal in other farces, just as travel via steamboat is common. Many farces contain accounts of going to see courtesans and being cheated; contain polemics against the theatre, more fully developed themes from history (especially about specific historical figures) and also on hot-button issues such as companionate marriage and education. We see various identities consolidated around those discourses and they are not always consistent. Unlike Women Enchanted by a Story, which lampoons most kīrtankārs, cautioning the audiences against their guiles and alerting them to the possibility that kīrtankārs may be false prophets, Steamboat, interestingly, contains no real moral centre—and at least not one that falls within the sensibilities of a particular caste community. Rather, it is lightly critical of brahmans, though not entirely so. In this chapter, I attempted to highlight the diversity contained within the genre of the farce, a diversity that required me to approach them from three perspectives foregrounding different aspects of their historical and popular relevance. Historically, the farce has received little nuanced treatment, with earliest sources condemning it for its essential conservatism and anti-reform agenda and for ruining the status of theatre. Many of these accusations indeed hold, and some authors were taken to court by reformers who were lampooned in the farces. Similarly, reformer’s newspapers avidly followed and critiqued these many farces for their content.66 But I have attempted to paint a slightly more rounded narrative in this chapter. As much as it may be

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true that these farces were indeed tools of the conservative intelligentsia, who even crudely depicted the Western-educated elite as impotent and suffering from wet dreams (in Mor. L.L.B Prahasan, for example), their social world was larger than that of the music-dramas, balladic poetry or of the translated dramas from English or Sanskrit. The diction, attention to practice and clever appraisals of aesthetic forms enabled the farce to treat topics and elements from society in a theatrical way. That is, they render elements from society perceptible by being portrayed within the space of the theatre. Unlike the periodicals of the day, which were critical of the farce, the farce was a genre accessible to many different elements of society— as indicated in the personalities it represented, and in the linguistic plurality of the farcical world. One of the more severe critiques of the late 19th century, Marathi intelligentsia has been to portray its publications as creating a largely homogenous (printed) public sphere, especially through the control of print media.67 This homogenising control forbade counter-discourses and narratives from taking root and circulating amongst the literati of Bombay and Pune—Jotirao Phule’s Three Jewels (1855) is a case in point. Containing a direct critique of brahmanism as well as colonial rule, it found no publishers willing to publish it and remained unpublished for over a century.68 With publishing and print media dominated by the literate intelligentsia, the farce was a vehicle for non-brahman voices, women’s voices, artistic critique (and dissenting orthodox brahman voices too). The three farces I read above illustrate some of these dynamics—simply by reading against the grain (Women Enchanted by a Story) or taking them at face value (Steamboats). They were thus much larger in their generic possibilities than simple conservative/reform binaries—and are not necessarily anti-reform just because reform-oriented intelligentsia labelled them as such, and some of the more famous farces are of that inclination. In fact, in many, it is difficult to say what the playwright’s intention may have been. And then, of course, the intention is not equal to reception. With Steamboat, it may well be the case that the performance provided a ludic space of experimentation, in which collective energies of the audience were contained and cathartically released. But others provide an intimate view of daily life and the sites where unfulfillable desires may be experienced, how that experience may be aestheticised, among many other possibilities. These ideas were then circulated among cities, as part of the repertoires of many different theatre troupes. Most of all, then, the farce enabled these street scenes and practices to become theatrical through a practice of spectatorship. Critique, discussion about the farce—these may have occurred in the press as well—but through the theatre, these were felt amongst one’s social others and

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peers, collectively and accessibly. The farce made events theatrical— itself a form of meditative reflection. It made things noticeable by virtue of their representation. And in doing so, it also brought together the inner and outer worlds of the theatre, enabling multiple audiences to see their various lives enacted with all the mundane details.

NOTES  1 Bakhtin writes of the novel, ‘For the first time, the subject of serious literary representation (although, it is true, at the same time comical) is portrayed without any distance, on the level of contemporary reality, in a zone of direct and even crude contact.’ See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 22–23.  2 Shrinivas Banhatti, Marāṭhi Raṅgabhūmīcā Itihāsa (Puṇeṃ: Vhīnasa Prakāśana, 1957), 174, 414. I left hasnyajogaa and vinodi intact to contrast the two terms. ‘Puranic’ or like/from the Puranas, refers to drama that had its origins in the tales of creation, religious paradigms of various deities and their associated stories, epic tropes, and other similar content that is contained in the religious literature of the Puranas.  3 Pratt offers a basic definition of ‘contact zone’: ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination—such as colonialism or slavery…’ see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 7.  4 The noted Telugu writer, Chilakamarti Lakshmi Narasimham (1867– 1946) and his teacher Kandukuri Veerasalingam (1848–1919) are also known to have used the term prahasana and ‘farce’ interchangeably for plays they wrote about social reform in the second half of the 19th century. See Vi Vi Yal Narasiṃhārāvu, Chilakamarti Lakshmi Narasimham (Sahitya Akademi, 1993), 46–50.   5 Yasavanta Ramakrshna Date, ‘Maharashtra Sabdakosa’, Dictionary, 1950 1932, 2138, 2176, http://dsalsrv02.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/date/, accessed 8 June 2015. A prahasan is: ‘1. One form in which hasya-rasa is the principle; Farce. In this constitution [one hears] deceptive speech [vyajokti] and the ridicule of one some topic. 2. Big laughter.’ Date, 2138. A ‘farce’ is: ‘1. A part in a dramatic representation or play [songa]; pretending/pretension; A kind of jesting…; 2. Prahasana; a witty/satirical kind of drama...’ Date, 2138, 2176.   6 In addition to those mentioned above, Baba Padmunji, translates farce as prahasana in his 1870 dictionary, indicating their equivalence and perhaps also, the general use of the term prahasana in Baba Padmanji, A Comprehensive Dictionary, English and Marathi (Printed at the Education Society’s Press, 1870), 239. The earliest attempt to equate the two most likely came in 1862 when Krishnashastri Chiplunkar equated prahasana

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  7

 8   9

10

11

12 13 14

15 16

17

with ‘farce’. See Bhimrav Balavant Kulkarni, ed., Marāṭhī phārsa: ekoṇisāvyā śatakātīla prātinidhika nivaḍaka phārsāñcā saṅgraha (Puṇe: Mahārāshṭra Sāhitya Parishada, 1987), 16. As a formal genre and as a term, perhaps we may say that already, at its introduction into Marathi and western-Indian life, it succumbs to a Bakhtinian trope, namely of the word in discourse: ‘the word does not exist in a neutral impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions’; Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 294. Stuart H. Blackburn, ‘The Burden of Authenticity: Printed Oral Tales in Tamil Literary History’, in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 119. For more, see Lee Siegel, Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Recent scholarship has begun to address this problem. For an examination of many different source materials, see Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (Open Book Publishers, 2015). Christian Novetzke, ‘Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars’ Notebooks Suggest about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra’, in Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield (Open Book Publishers, 2015), 170. This point is, of course, difficult to ascertain. It is clear that the farce did speak about or ridicule things from the real world, beyond the bounds of moderation, according to one critic. See Appaji Kulkarni, Marāṭhī Raṅgabhūmi (Puṇẽ: Āryabhūṣaṇa Chāpākhānyānta, 1903), 35–36. kathālubdha bāyakāṅcā fārsa literally, ‘A farce about Story-bound women’. See Kulkarni’s edited volume Marāṭhī phārsa, 63–71. Meera Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (Ranikhet; New Delhi: Permanent Black; Distributed by Orient Longman, 2007), 120. Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern India circa 1600–1800 ce’, Modern Asian Studies, FirstView (August 2015): 1–42, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X15000062, accessed 18 August 2015. I find de Certeau’s definition of tactics useful and use it in conjunction with Berlant’s notions of ‘lived immanence’ from her essay ‘Cruel Optimism’. For more on kīrtan and kīrtankārs, see Anna C. Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also Christian Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), esp. Chapter 3. Willful unshorn widow = svairasakesha. It was common practice to shave the heads of widows in the 19th century, and it was the topic of

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much reformist ire. Sālu’s unshorn status makes her unusual, and at least influenced by the ideals of ‘reform’. 18 Another farce, An Entertaining Farce about Sweets (1886), also contains accounts of women who attend an evening kīrtan. See Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 212–223. 19 Viṭhoba or Viṭhṭhal is generally taken to be an incarnation of Viśnu and is the focus of bhakti traditions of worship in Maharashtra. For a good introduction to bhakti in Maharashtra; see I. Karve, ‘On the Road: A Maharashtrian Pilgrimage’, The Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 1 (1 November 1962): 13–29. For more, see Vaudeville in Charlotte Vaudeville and Vasudha Dalmia, Myths, Saints, and Legends in Medieval India (Bombay; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, ed. Steven Rendall, 1. paperback print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 36–37. Lived immanence, see Lauren Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 94–97. 21 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 63. Italics added for emphasis. 22 Commonly, a kothā was a space where a courtesan would sing and dance to patrons who came to watch and savor her performance, often as connoisseurs of song and dance. 23 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 66. A pagḍī is a kind of wrapped headdress. 24 Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism, 108. 25 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 68. 26 Ibid., 69. 27 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, 1985), 49–66. 28 For a good overview of the vārkarī tradition, see Vaudeville’s chapter in Vaudeville and Dalmia, Myths, Saints, and Legends in Medieval India. 29 Sharmila Rege, ‘Conceptualising Popular Culture: “Lavani” and “Powada” in Maharashtra’, Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 11 (16 March 2002): 1038–1047. 30 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 69. The exact word is ‘Sudharlele’ which can be used to speak about progress, improvement or reform. Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, who co-founded the newspaper Kesari with Bal Gangadhar Tilak, India’s first nationalist politician; Agarkar also founded his own newspaper, Sudharak or Reform. 31 Anshu Malhotra, ‘Bhakti and the Gendered Self: A Courtesan and a Consort in Mid-Nineteenth Century Punjab’, Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (November 2012): 1522–1523. 32 See, for example, Baba Padmanji, A Comparison of Krishna and Christ (Bombay Tract and Book Society, 1867). 33 Susan Bayly, for example, also mentions the anti-brahmanical and ‘casteless’ interpretation taken of bhakti in the aftermath of the Marathi confederacy. See Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, ed. Gordon Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46–48.

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232 World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India 34 Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism’, 97. Emphasis added. 35 Berlant, 94. 36 References to Ranjha’s use of disguise are scattered throughout Mir’s text. Even more importantly, Ranjha in disguise enters Hir’s household and wins over Hir’s sister-in-law. For two moments when ‘disguise’ is discussed, see Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, South Asia across the Disciplines 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 125, 172. 37 Lakshmaṇa Moreśvaraśāstrī Haḷabe, Muktamálá: a Novel (Bombay: Sakhram Parshuram Pandit at the Indu-Prakash Press, 1880), 56–60. 38 See, for example, the noted writer and satirist Prahlad Keshav Atre and Catharina Kiehnle, An Indian Tartuffe: P.K. Atre’s Comedy ‘Where There Is a Guru There Are Women’ (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). 39 bāśpa naukā, athvā āgaboticā fārsa. 40 For a detailed excursus on migration patterns, see Meera Kosambi, Bombay and Poona: A Socio-Ecological Study of Two Indian Cities, 1650– 1900 (Stockholm: Universitet Stockholms, 1980). 41 Headrick has one chapter on shipping and navigation in his book, that is good for an overview, if not these kinds of smaller details. See Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (USA: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18–48. 42 Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 34. 43 The hometown of one’s grandmother. Marathi contains a specific word for the hometown of one’s mother (māhera) as well as grandmother (ājola). 44 Not quite sure if ‘Shinor’ here refers to a caste, a professional title or simply a name. The term mela or ‘dead person’ is a common insult often used by women of offending men. The implication is that the person is no better than a corpse or carcass. James Thomas Molesworth, A Dictionary: Maráthı́ and English, 2d ed., rev.enl. (Bombay: Printed for Government at the Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1857), 666. 45 Literally, ‘what he does is eastward’, referring to the primacy of eastwardfacing as being metaphorically ‘correct’. 46 ‘Sadu’ = affectionate name for Sadashiv. 47 ‘Bajirao’ was a name of several Peshwas during the 18th and early 19th centuries. When used as such, it refers predominantly to the first Bajirao (1700–1740; in office 1720–1740), who was known for expanding the Maratha territories while serving as the de facto ruler under the Chhatrapati Shahu Raje Bhonsale (1682–1749; ruled from 1708 to 1749) 48 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 370–371. 49 Ibid., 373–375. 50 A Mahar is a caste term referring to people traditionally engaged in cleaning occupations, often also working with corpses. Mahars were considered untouchable by caste Hindus in the 19th century. The gāyatri mantra is a hymn from the Rg Veda that is taught to boys when they undergo the thread ceremony. It marks the beginning of the boy’s studies and entry into the first phase of life as a seeker of Brahman.

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51 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 376–377. 52 Ibid., 375. Amusingly enough, these scenes remind me of Marx’s comments about trains, and how technology would alleviate social differences. If they did, then they did so only after first causing more friction. See Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, New York Dail Tribune, 8 August 1853. 53 Here, following Hutcheon and others, I distinguish between parody and satire—parody looks inwards at forms, whereas satire looks outwards at ‘society’. See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (University of Illinois Press, 1985), 43. Hutcheon uses this distinction throughout her text. 54 Saṅgīta Ghotāḷā in Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 224–233. 55 ‘Shankara’ here is a euphemism for eros, love or more specifically, Shringar. 56 You’ll be full of all desires! 57 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 224. 58 For a broad overview of the play’s history, see Romila Thapar, Śakuntalā: Texts, Readings, Histories, Anthem South Asian Studies (London: Anthem, 2002). 59 Schultz, Singing a Hindu Nation, 34. 60 I have written about Dongre’s troupe in a previous work. See Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘The Popular Itinerant Theatre of Maharashtra, 1843–1880’, Asian Theatre Journal 32, no. 1 (June 2015): 210. 61 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 231. 62 Walimbe, Sugam Marathi Vyakaran Lekhan (Nitin Prakashan, 2014), 217. 63 Alfred Manwaring, Marathi Proverbs (Clarendon Press, 1899), 31. 64 The earliest edition of Kirloskar’s Sangit Shakuntal that I have been able to locate is the 9th edition, from 1889. See Balvant Pandurang Kirloskar, Sangit Shakuntal, 9th ed. (Pune: Aryahushan Press, 1889). 65 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 34. 66 Kulkarni, Marāṭhī phārsa, 22. 67 Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 201–264. 68 Arvind Waman Kulkarni, Vismarnaat Gelele Marathi Natake (Pune: Padmagandha, 2004), 41–53.

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CONCLUSION Theory after the Archives? I began this book by asking readers to remember various forgotten literary pasts and to be alive to the possibilities that inhere in those pasts. In doing so, I charted two courses concomitant with the two halves of this book. The first described the way conversations about literature and literary practices in the colonies were part of a global zeitgeist, palpably demonstrating the difficulty in attributing primacy to European metropoles, let alone labelling activities in the colonies, such as the Mumbai–Pune (Bombay–Poona) hub, behind the times. Indeed, if we reconsider what it means for Bombay to have been the secondlargest city in the British Empire, then certainly, work by economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz and recently Kaveh Yazdani leads us to compare metropoles of the appropriate size. One cannot compare England to all of China as Pomeranz argues, but one can compare England to the Yangtze River delta. Or, for that matter, compare all of Europe (and a little more) to all of China, in which case there are many developmental similarities between the hinterlands of Europe and the hinterlands of China. And so too with Yazdani’s appraisal of Gujarat and Mysore.1 These economic models call into question developmental and teleological models of modernity and also alert us to the need for better comparisons to be made—why not with literature? Just a few months before writing this conclusion, for example, a video bar graph was circulating on many academic colleagues’ Facebook pages. The video shows the growth and decline of the top ten megacities in the world from 1500 to 2019 ce.2 In the year 1500, only one European city was one of the world’s ten largest: Paris, at number eight, while Beijing was the largest. The two Indian late premodern (or middle modern, according to Yazdani) cities from that list exist today only as rich archaeological sites of bygone empires. Vijaynagar, located some 350 kilometres inland from Goa in the centre of the Deccan plateau was the second-largest city after Beijing, and Gauda (Gour) nearly 330 kilometres north of Kolkata was the sixth-largest. Naturally, in line with Yazdani’s work, Ahmedabad in Gujarat makes a significant appearance in the 17th and 18th centuries as does Bijapur—the capital of the Bijapur Sultanate (1490–1686)— whose wealth rivalled that of the Mughals of Delhi.3 And then in the 19th, we see Bombay and Calcutta. Such facts reinforce Pomeranz 234

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and Yazdani’s claims—and ask us to similarly reconsider the sites of literary production (and not just other economic production) around the world in comparative ways. To compare divergences between Gujarat, Mysore and European capitals, Yazdani speaks of Ernst Bloch’s Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigkeit, the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous—but I prefer to think of these through Jameson’s and other recent work that attends to notions of a singular modernity in which modern capitalism of the past five centuries, rather than creating homogeneity, creates difference and unevenness.4 That is, what does it mean for literary modernity to diverge, after a theoretically and practically rich, simultaneous interaction? In the second half of my book, Chapters 3 through 5, I described that uneven divergence in terms of literary ecology. One way to think about divergence—and specifically to think about what is forgotten because we use inappropriate tools to view our literary objects (inappropriate linguistic tools, inappropriate generic tools and not always applicable theoretical tools)—is to follow Franco Moretti’s work with distant reading.5 There is more to the past than meets the eye—and the canon is but a disfigured, consolidated past that reinforces its very processes of exclusion. But unlike Moretti’s materials, we encounter another problem in South Asia, even though the instinct to search for materials that tell a different story is the same. In his ‘Notes on the Growth of Marathi literature’—and in his case, it was textually determined, printed literature—M.G. Ranade (1842–1901) writes to demonstrate the considerable increase in Marathi printed materials.6 Owing to the stigma of print (see Chapter 2), the corpus of printed Marathi books had remained quite small—not because the printing press did not exist in South Asia—the Portuguese had introduced it in Goa in 1556 and the British in Bombay in 1674.7 But traditionally literate castes did not feel the need to adopt print technology. When print technology came to be used in a more widespread way in the 1800s, it still took a few generations before enough material was available for instruction. So few instructional and other materials were available in Marathi, in fact, that attempts at offering a Marathi course at the University of Bombay failed in the early 1850s failed due to a paucity of materials. It took until 1901 to make it so, and Ranade penned his note to demonstrate the availability of materials for use.8 Returning to Moretti: his technique, while applicable to Europe and China, is completely inapplicable to the Indian situation in the 19th century: where are the written literary records that can be mined for data? Shall I also mention another hoary, related, topic: that of optical character recognition? How well does it work for non-Roman printed work? Unlike the neat 26 letters of the Roman script, Devanāgrī has 33 consonants and 14 vowels; but there

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are hundreds of common consonant conjuncts. And manuscripts? India has one of the largest manuscript archives in the world. These issues ask us to rethink the word and concept of ‘literature’ itself. Indeed, if English is to be the cosmopolitan language of our era, which by hook and crook it is, then it too must change to accommodate definitions that enable more accurate world views. That is, conceptually, we must detach literature from reading and writing. In looking to the past as I have here, it is evident that the concept of literature is an imperfect ground for comparison that needs to be more expansive, without which various literary pasts are rendered invisible. Thus, instead of focusing on and following the many solid editions and collections of a scholar like Meenakshi Mukherjee, I have chosen to forget the novel and instead rethink the way epic poetry (kāvya) and the poetry of śāhirs was reworked through theatre, especially music drama, as literature. It was a genre that circulated and was accessible, both literary and inclusive, but much of it was ‘unmarked’ leaving behind not gaps, but consequences in the form of anthologies and compendia, given the differing modes of reception that are not part of performances and theatre’s ontology but rather something else that remains after.9 And the disappearances and gaps have been passed through into newer genres, as I described earlier: a continuity between manuscript and print culture, at least at first. I have been lucky to have found many images and wall posters, and other ephemera that have aided my research, and that have ultimately given us a small indication of the visual economy of these works. That is the significance of simultaneous and uneven literary modernity: not simply by creating lateral associations did Marathi literature become ‘modern’ but also by looking backwards to its own past and reinventing the genre. So, in certain ways, the colonial encounter was one through which Marathi literature converged with global discourses about literature— and simultaneously diverged. As with all scholarly works, I have had to follow one strand through my sources, from the śāhīrs and pandit-kavis to music-drama, largely to the exclusion of many other kinds of ‘literature’. I could have, for example, spoken about Marathi novels—beginning with Baba Padmanji’s Yamunā Paryaṭan (1857), the first in Marathi. But so many layers about the first Marathi novel demonstrate its problematic dynamics. Not only is it a conversion narrative about the character of Yamuna, modelled on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress but it also was written by a major high-caste convert figure in the world of 19th-century letters. Padmanji’s novel, therefore, speaks in many ways to the kinds of hagiographic influences on the novel that were central to religious narratives—but specifically Christian conversion ones of the kind that McKeon mentions.10 Had I wanted to demonstrate rupture narratives, this would have adequately

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fit the bill, bringing with it a large body of literature about conversion in colonial India, but more theoretical literary problems as well.11 How can the Marathi, and perhaps by extension, the Indian novel possibly be viewed, if not as a derivative genre, at least in its earliest instances? Chaucer too was derivative in many ways and greatly influenced by short stories during his Italian voyages, but questions of power and modernity circumvent such questions from creeping into Chaucer studies, from creating the kinds of literary anxiety that ‘derivative’ entails. Therefore, I have attempted to showcase how my materials were intimately familiar with local literary pasts and with travelling troupes from overseas. While certainly not derivative in a derogatory sense of the word, their productions were rather innovative as well. Studies of the Marathi novel have shown something similar—that early Marathi novels used models from kāvya or epic poetry.12 Naturally, there are also many 17th- and 18th-century prose narratives—bakhars—but these were not popular literature and rarely circulated outside of the courts in which they were written. But another trajectory could have followed some of the methods through which Marathi poetry adopted formalisms from English poetry, or even epic conventions from Greek and Latin tradition. A person like M.M. Kunte (1835–1888), for example, saw fit to dispense with the povāḍā genre, specifically stating that he wished to write an epic. Both his content as well as the use of meter were ridiculed by his contemporaries when he wrote Rājā Śivājī (1871; ‘King Shivaji’). At the same time, he received a literary prize for it, whereas Jotirao Phule (1827–1890), the pre-eminent reformer and anti-caste intellectual of 19th-century India was denied a prize for his own Povāḍā: Chatrapatī Śivājīrāje Bhonsale Yāñcā (1869; ‘Povāḍā about the King Shivaji’). And Phule wrote a povāḍā to boot, utilising the historical form most associated already with Shivaji for different and new political ends. Historical contestations over what a povāḍā is capable of representing, and for whom, in addition to other genres, especially emergent ones, could have also been one direction for this book. I have written about some of these issues elsewhere and have therefore not included them between these pages.13 And there are many other strands that could have been followed using a diverse array of methods, discourses and objects of study. But the one that spoke to a popular audience is the one that I chose owing to the popularity of late premodern śāhīrs and kīrtankār pandit-kavis. At the same time, several secondary arguments and observations also hold this book together thematically, which deserve some mention here. Not entirely by design, the presence of courtly culture features prominently in this book, in addition to repeated references to pandits

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working in the colonial government, global romanticisms and notions of literacy and orality that complicate the concept of ‘literature’. Courtly culture focalised through a host of powerful aristocratic families—from the Peshwa courts to the Patwardhans of Sangli, the Maharajas of Satara and Kolhapur or even the Gaikwads of Baroda, among others, in addition to various forms of colonial patronage that mimicked courtly culture— speaks to a panchoric ecology of literary production. A region in which a strong shared literary culture circulated, despite political fragmentation. Vāṅmay’s circulation was overtaken by sāhitya’s different circulatory possibilities, through practices of print such as typesetting and editing, standardisation of language and basic canonisation through anthologies, in addition to intellectual exchange. Walter Ong astutely notes that print culture enables not just simple circulation, but the commodification of the written word.14 Sāhitya, in this sense, is the logical outcome of a process of commodification. In this book, I have argued for an ecological shift in Marathi literature to describe that process. Doubtless, a few critics and scholars will find my use of ecologies unsettling, inadequate, inappropriate—some will likely ask why I use ‘foreign’ concepts to look at Marathi ‘literature’. Others may also fault me for speaking of ecological as well as economic models in viewing the printed word and working as part of commodity culture. But at various moments, these models are useful and evocative, and moreover, precise. Importantly, an ecological model, as I’ve understood it, is not a teleological model. We do not follow a trajectory from traditional to modern to post-something.15 Economic models, problematically, often rely on progress. Ecologies rely on contact with other ecologies, aware of the many intersecting dynamics of power that shape those interactions, but at the same time ecologies are not determined entirely through those dynamics. Significantly, while ecologies grow, they don’t progress in the sense that older existent forms continue to do so, so long as they fulfil a social function, perhaps not even the same social function that they originally fulfilled. In this sense, while dramatists such as Kirloskar were certainly deeply influenced by multiple traditions, many of those traditions did not ‘disappear’: one can still hear kīrtan nearly every evening with regular performances within temple spaces. Śāhirī poetry, on the other hand, given its associations with courts, is rarer. By coming into contact with another literary ecology, one quickly becoming cosmopolitan, with all the violence that the process entailed, Marathi experienced a second (arguably third) vernacularisation.16 If pandits like Parshuram Pant Godbole as well as playwrights such as Kirloskar translated avidly from Sanskrit into Marathi, many individuals also translated books from English into Marathi—such as Krishnashastri Chiplunkar—translation from cosmopolitan languages

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is a key component of vernacular ecologies. But a century earlier, during the late premodern era, through its use as an administrative language throughout many regional centres in India, Marathi sought to transform itself from its panchoric situation—one in which several closely related languages existed alongside each other, containing an overlapping array of literatures and social norms, and the distribution of political power did not coincide with the boundaries of language—into something more. That is, Marathi was used as a bureaucratic language in a larger area than its everyday use. And even then, its political centres were only loosely affiliated. But it never became the cosmopolitan language that replaced Persian, but instead experienced a second vernacularisation with regards to English. In writing this book, I have examined materials that tell this story too, roughly from the late 18th until the late 19th century. An ecologies model, therefore, permits us to think about influence, growth and change without developmental modalities. In the introduction, I asked us to ponder the weltanschauung we have made in literary studies, dispensing with knowledge of the language of other places and favouring the global literature produced and consumed by a patina of cosmopolitan literati, in which I include myself and many peers. I even used statistics! I haven’t sought to replace that problematic world with South Asia, or with Marathilanguage studies, well aware that in postcolonial studies too, sometimes the size of the erstwhile colony jostles out smaller voices, other colonialisms and neocolonialisms. Rather, I have asked us to avoid thinking of South Asia as a monolingual entity (English, or, I may add, Hindi or Bengali) and therefore not as a unitary space, some of whose dynamics may be universalisable, but not all. Permit me a small joke: a friend once casually remarked that he attended a seminar in which no Bengali spoke of Tagore, no Marathi spoke of Shivaji, and no Malayali spoke of Marx. And then he woke up.17 In India, all regions have their icons who find expression in many realms of political and cultural life—but can we universalise any of these figures for the rest of India? Rather, most postcolonial locales are regional and national at once—perhaps one of the reasons I and many others feel so strongly about the question of Hindi as a national language in India. That is, even the Hindi-speaking literati should make efforts to learn any of the other constitutionally recognised languages in India, thereby vernacularising Hindi rather than trying to cosmopolitanise it with all the trappings of power that that entails. Within our own academic ecologies, I wonder what the discursive landscape would be, the weltanschauung and purchase literary studies has on the world, if, say, half of the persons engaged in postcolonial studies were working on minoritarian languages as their primary language … what about

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most persons? What would that world and world literature be? How would literature itself change? Pune 2022

NOTES   1 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Kaveh Yazdani, India, Modernity and the Great Divergence: Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.), 2017.  2 Top 10 Most Populous City | From 1500 to 2019 !, accessed 14 September 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX0bX1UEM8.   3 Pushkar Sohoni, The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate: Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India, 2018.  4 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002); Sharae Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, 2015.   5 Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso Books, 2013).   6 Mahadev Ranade, ‘A Note on the Growth of Marathi Literature’, The Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 20 (1898): 78–105.   7 Anant Kakba Priolkar and J.H. da Cunha Rivara, The Printing Press in India: Its Beginnings and Early Development. Being a Quatercentenary Commemoration Study ... and an Historical Essay on the Konkani Language (Bombay: Marathi Samshodhan Mandal, 1958).   8 Rā. Bhā Pāṭaṇakara, Apūrṇa krāntī (Mumbaī: Mauja Prakāśana, 1999), 182.   9 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London [u.a.]: Routledge, 2011), 105. 10 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 91–95. 11 For more on Padmanji, see Deepra Dandekar and Dinkar Shankar Savarkar, The Subhedar’s Son: A Narrative of Brahmin-Christian Conversion from Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 12 Aniket Jaaware, ‘Two Sentences: A Speculation on Genre in Early Marathi Novels’, in Early Novels in India, ed. Meenakshi Mukherjee (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), 73–80. 13 Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘Contesting the Povāḍā: History, Form, and Performance’, in Generating Knowledge in Performance, ed. Erika FischerLichte, Torsten Jost and Milos Kosic (London: Routledge, forthcoming); Kedar A. Kulkarni, ‘The Sentiments of Subjection: Attachment, Slavery, and Sexuality in Marathi Lyric Poetry’, South Asian History & Culture, under review. 14 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, ed. John Hartley (London; New York: Routledge, 2013), 116.

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15 Interestingly, the whole concept of traditional society was itself formulated in colonial setting, especially in the work of Henry Maine. See Chapter 4 and Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Origins of Indirect Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 16 Arguably, this was Marathi’s third vernacularisation: the first in response to Sanskrit, the second in response to Persian and then English. I do, unfortunately, lack the know-how and knowledge to incorporate Persian sources into my scholarship. A lacuna I hope someone else will fill. 17 Anil Zankar, ‘I Was at a Seminar Where No Bengali Spoke of Tagore,...’, https://www.facebook.com/anil.zankar.5/posts/10162917453925425, accessed 28 February 2020.

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INDEX A

C

Agarkar, Gopal Ganesh, 141, 148, 149, 198, 231 Altekar Hindu Drama Company, xi, 6-12, 106 A Musical about Śakuntalā, see Saṅgīt Śakuntalā A Musical about Subhadra, see Saṅgīt Śaubhadra A Rasa Reader, 16, 71 Arnold, Matthew, 43 Austin, J.L., 70 Authorship/Authority, 25, 30, 84, 85, 97, 109

Candy, Thomas, 87 Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra, 63 Cheah, Pheng, 44, 68, 73, 74 Chiplunkar, Krishnashastri, 57, 93, 96, 99, 157, 229, 238 Chiplunkar, Vishnushastri, 29–31, 44–45, 55–68, 71–73, 77, 78, 83, 112 Course in General Linguistics, 44, 69, 70, 79 Culler, Jonathon, 43, 64

B

Damrosch, David, 4 Desai, Gaurav, 21 Desai, V.S., 105 Deshpande, Prachi, 48, 76, 93, 98 Deshpande, Sudhanva, 105, 109 Drama, see Genre, esp. saṅgīt nāṭak, music drama

D

Bakhtin, M.M., 1, 18, 32, 158, 160, 161, 181, 199, 207, 209, 210, 229, 230 Banhatti, S.N., 77, 102, 105, 209, 210 Barve affair, 129, 138, 140, 141, 144, 148 Kolhapur affair, 129 Baudelaire, Charles, 43 Beecroft, Alexander, 15, 18, 26, 33, 152 Bhagavadgītā, 125 Bhave, Vishnu Amrut, xi, 26, 30, 83, 85, 96–99, 101–110, 112, 127, 158, 160, 184, 197 Bhāgvata Purāṇa, 161, 165 Bhonsale, Chhatrapati Shivaji, 3, 48, 142 Blake, William, 62 Boat of Tears, 218 Bombay Durpan, 136 Bornstein, George, 84, 94 Bronkhorst, Johannes, 69 Burke, Edmund, 59, 60

E East India Company, 21, 22, 97, 134–135, 153, 154 Education, 3, 26, 55, 64, 65, 83, 87, 88, 95, 96, 99, 105, 112, 114, 123, 134, 144, 147, 227 Eliot, T.S., 43, 111 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 55, 62, 66 English literature, see Literature Eurochronology and belatedness, 44, 64, 69–71 and modernity, 234–235

F Farce about Steamboats, 218

243

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244

Index

G Gaekwad of Baroda, 134 Gautam, Sanjay, 136 Gautier, Pierre, 43 Genre ballads, 52, 58, 59, 60, 62, 118, 127, 161, 168, 175, 189, 211, 216, 228. See also povāḍā farce 9, 12, 13, 32, 140, 147, 209–229 Godbole, Parshuram Ballal, 83, 87, 167, 97 kāvya, 13, 31, 34, 47, 75, 85, 87, 89, 96, 159, 160, 161, 167, 189, 236, 237 kīrtan, 83, 95, 167, 175, 195. See also kīrtankār lāvaṇī, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 58–60, 175, 182, 182, 196, 216, 225, See also lyric poetry lyric poetry, 43, 59. See also lāvaṇī music drama, 31, 32, 97, 107, 138, 155, 161, 209, 223–228, 236. See also saṅgīt nāṭak novel, 1, 4–6, 14, 19, 21, 23, 25, 29, 33, 55, 158–161, 171, 199, 200, 217, 229, 236, 237 parody, 210 performance genres, 6, 29, 161, 196 povāḍā, 49, 50, 53–55, 58, 59, 67, 104, 161, 168, 180, 182, 189, 211, 237 Mumbaīcā povāḍā, 50–54 Subhadrecā povāḍā, 168, 175, 181 Sāhirī vāṅmay, 52 saṅgīt nāṭāk, 23, 97, 108, 161, 223. See also music drama Godbole, Parshuram Pant, 97 Godbole, Ravji Shastri, 95

H Hastings, Warren, 134 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 28, 30, 45, 55, 56, 59, 138

Hewett, W.S., 102, 126, 144–146 Holkars of Indore, 141 Holquist, Michael, 199

I Indar Sabha, 137 Indian aesthetics, 5 dhvanī, 66 implication/suggestion, 68 Kāvyaprakāśa of Mammaṭa, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 73 rasa, 9, 12, 14, 16, 35, 61, 68, 71, 160, 198, 225

J Jacobi, Dr, 63, 65 Jambhekar, Balshastri, 136 Jośī, Rām, 1, 50, 54, 111, 168, 175, 181, 182, 193 Johnson, Robert, 110 Jones, William, 55, 62, 63, 125

K Kalāvantiṇī, 138 Kālidāsa, 123, 148 Kalidas Elphinstone Society, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 55, 57, 59, 60, Kantor, Roanne, 21 Kennedy, Monika Bhagat, 21 Kesari, 141 Khadilkar, Krishnaji Prabhakar, 108 Kheḷ, 12 Kielhorn, 65–66, 102 Kirloskar, Balvant Pandurang, 31, 32, 93, 102, 108, 116, 124, 125, 128, 130, 132, 137, 138, 141, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 159 Kirloskar Drama Troupe, 137 kīrtankār, 93, 98, 193, 194, 213, 214–216, 227, 237 Kolhatkar, Bhaurao, 194 Kolhatkar, Ramchandra, 193 Kolhatkar, S.P., 187 Kosambi, Meera, 212

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Index Kīrtan, 83, 95, 104 Kulastrī, 138 Kulkarni, Appaji, 106 Kuttiyattam theatre, 127

L Language Indian languages, 4–6, 45, 46 Marathi, 19, 30, Sanskrit, 19, 46 and vernacularisation, 15, 18, 29, 36, 238, 239, 241 Language, theories of apoha theory, 69–70 phonology, 16, 70, 71, 93 and Saussure, Ferdinand de, 16, 44, 65, 69–71, 79, 80 Laukik, 28, 30, 48, 50, 53, 54–55, 60, 72. See also world/worldly/ worldliness Laukiktā, 44, 54, 72. See also world/ worldly/worldliness Linguistics and poetics, 44 Literacy, 4–5, 6 graphic literacy, 4–5, 7 and genre, 23 kaṇṭhastha, 58, 86 vāgmin, 46, 70 Literature African literature, 4–5, 21 Cosmopolitan ecologies of, 19, 26, 28, 211, 236, 239 and canonicity, 73, 85, 111–113 concept of, 24, 45–49, 236, 238 defined, 43 and ecology, 15, 18, 19, 23, 32, 235, 238 English literature, 3, 19, 58 expressive theories of, 43, 55, 61, 66, 102 Indian literature, 3, 6, 14, 62 Marathi literature, 3, 15, 21, 28, 30, 33, 48, 56, 71, 83, 84, 87–88, 209, 235–236, 238 Panchoric ecologies of, 15, 18, 27, 28, 29, 33, 72, 238, 239

245

parameters of, 44 processes of, 83 as sāhitya, 33, 46–48, 52, 60, 67, 71, 72, 82, 83, 87, 89, 238 translation of, 46 as vāṅmay, 33, 46–48, 52, 60, 71–72, 87, 238 and worldliness, 44 vernacular ecologies of, 18, 19, 29, 31, 72 Little Clay Cart, 197 Lok, 27–28. See also world/worldly/ worldliness Lyrical Ballads, 62

M Mahabharat, 58, 82, 88, 92, 108, 127, 158, 161, 162, 171 Maharajas of Kolhapur, 144 Maharashtra Sahitya Council, 47 Mahratta, 140 Maisel, Perry, 70 Maratha confederacy, 147 Maratha empire, 13 Marathe, Kashinath Balkrishna, 57, 198 Marathi drama, 85, 105 grammar, 93 kāvya, 87 language, 2–3, 44, 46, 47, 56, 87 poetic traditions, 55 śāhīr, 46, 56, 71, 82 theatre, 99 Marx, Karl, 18, 30, 84, 239 Mediation and colonialism, 15–16 Michelet, Jules, 43 Molesworth, James T., 83 Moropant, 13, 58, 88–90, 127, 167–169, 171, 174, 178, 180, 184, 185, 187 Mufti, Aamir, 3, 25, 45, 55, 62–63, 74 Mughal empire, 22 Muktāmāla, 159, 217 Müller, Max, 43 Multilingualism, 7, 20–24

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Index

Musical Confusion, 196, 223

N ‘Nala and Damayanti’ episode, 88 Nashik Victorian Music-[drama] Company (VNSM), 138, 140 Nāṭya-kavitā-saṃgraha, 96, 127, 184 Naṭyaśāstra, 169 Navnīt, 84, 86, 87, 89, 91, 95, 97, 98, 104, 108, 111, 113 Nawab of Awadh, 129 Nāyakīṇī, 138 Nemade, Bhalchandra, 26, 27, 28, 29 Norton Anthology, 94 Novetzke, Christian, 117, 211

O Orality, 5, 34, 93, 96, 238. See also vāṅmay Orientalism German Orientalism and comparative philology, 64–65. See also Kielhorn, Jacobi

P Padmavati, 81 Paṇḍit kavi, see kīrtankār Pandit, Vaman, 58 Pater, Walter, 43 Patronage aristocratic , 2, 31, 49, 52, 99, 103, 133–134, 137, 140, 142, 144, 145, 148, 238 colonial, 3–4, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 25 commercial, 4, 7, 86, 97, 99, 105, 128, 133, 140, 142, 149 and costume, 159 and dramatic literature and institutional changes, 19 structures of, 148 Patwardhan, Chintamanrao, 97, 99 Performance, see Genre, vāṅmay, kīrtan, povāḍā, lāvaṇī Peshwas, 18, 48, 58, 183, 227

Phandi, Anant, 111 Phelan, Peggy, 82, 84, 114, 240 Phule, Jotirao, 26, 228, 237 Poetry, see Genre, esp. kāvya, kirtan, lāvaṇī, povāḍā, vāṅmay Poet, 1–2, 58–60. See also kīrtankār, śāhīr Pollock, Sheldon, 16, 34, 35, 36, 46, 54, 64, 70, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79, 115, 162, 202 Povāḍā, see Genre Princely states, 134, 135, 144 British India, 144 East India Company, 135 foreign policy and warfare, 129 rulers of, 135 Print culture, 30, 48, 84, 85, 93, 94, 236, 238 Prostitution, prostitutes, 5. See also Kalāvantiṇī and Nāyakīṇī And contagious diseases acts, 136

R Raja of Kolhapur, 143 Rājā Śivājī, 237 Raman, Bhavani, 86 Ramanujan, A.K., 85, 162 Ramaswamy, Sumathy, 55–56 Ramayan, 51, 58, 81, 98, 100, 102, 108, 109, 113, 114, 160, 162, 165 Ranade, M.G., 160, 198 Rangarajan, Padma, 30, 45, 68 Rani, Lakshmi Bai, 135 Rao, Gangadhar, 135 Rao, Sayaji, 134 Rao, T. Madhav, 134 Rao, Vinayak, 213 Ray, Satyajit, 129 Romanticism, 29, 43, 44, 55, 60, 62, 64, 66, 72, 83, 124, 238 dogmas, 55 and expression, 65 global, 29, 31, 56, 64, 238 and language, 15, 31, 30, 44, 47, 55 and literature, 18, 29, 44, 56, 83

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Index

247

movements, 123 Romeo and Juliet, 197 Rushdie, Salman, 20, 24, 26, 27 Ruskin, John, 43

U

S

V

Sāhitya, see Literature, concept of Said, Edward W., 17, 19, 26, 60 Saṅgīt Śakuntalā, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132, 135, 137, 141, 144, 158, 198, 199, 226 Saṅgīt Saubhadra, 158, 192, 199 Saussy, Haun, 70 Saxena, Akshya, 20 Selections from the Marathi Poets, see Navnīt Sen, Keshub Chandra, 63 Shakespeare, 112, 116, 123, 148, 157, 224, Shatranj ke Khilari, 128, 129 Shālāpatrak, 57 Sītā Svayaṃvar, 99 Subhadrecā Povāḍā, 181

vāṅmay, see Literature, concept of Viswanathan, Gauri, 19, 21, 23, 24, 147 Vivekananda, Swami, 63

T Tarkhadkar, Dadoba Pandurang, 57 Tembe, Govindrao, 108 Thousand and One Nights, 123 Three Jewels, 228 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 141, 155, 198, 231

Umrao Jaan, 136 Uttararāmacaritam, 148

W Whitney, William Dwight, 68 Wilkins, Charles, 125 Women Enchanted by a Story, 193, 212, 213, 223, 227 Wordsworth, William, 55, 62, 66 Wordsworth, William (grandson), 78 World/Worldly/Worldliness, 26, 28, 29–30, 44, 45, 47–48, 54, 55, 72–73 World literature and comparative literature, 2, 28 and postcolonial literature, 34, 74 and postcolonial theory, 19, 25, 37, 38 and worldliness, 26, 44, 54, 55

Y Yakśagāṇ, 83, 97 Yamunā Paryaṭan, 236

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kedar Arun Kulkarni received his PhD in Literature from UC San Diego in 2013. Since then, he has held fellowships at Yale University’s South Asian Studies Council, the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Interweaving Performance Cultures research centre at the Free University of Berlin. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University in Pune, India.

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