India after World History: Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization 9789400604322

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India after World History

Global Connections: Routes and Roots Global Connections: Routes and Roots explores histories that challenge existing demarcations between and within local, regional, and interregional arenas. The series encompasses single-site and vernacular histories as much as studies of long-distance connection. This series seeks to bridge early modern and modern history. By taking a wide timeframe of c. 1200 to the present, we embrace the many and shifting nodal points, key regions, modes of transportation and other forms of connectivity that together form the “routes” and “roots” of global history. This includes the making and unmaking of power in different manifestations, as well as the intellectual genealogies and trajectories of the ideas that did so. We welcome all work that explores the global as method. We stress the need to recover local primary sources as a way of investigating both the individual and the collective agency of all those involved in the making of the global. Series Editors Carolien Stolte, Leiden University Mariana de Campos Francozo, Leiden University Editorial Board Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University Scott Levi, The Ohio State University Su Lin Lewis, Bristol University Gerard McCann, University of York Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College Alessandro Stanziani, École des hautes études en sciences sociales Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia Other titles in this series: Jos Gommans and Ariel Lopez (eds), Philippine Confluence. Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, c. 1500–1800, 2020 Michele Louro, Carolien Stolte, Heather Streets-Salter and Sana Tannoury-Karam (eds), The League Against Imperialism. Lives and Afterlives, 2020

INDIA AFTER WORLD HISTORY Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization

Edited by Neilesh Bose

Leiden University Press

Global Connections: Routes and Roots, volume 3 Cover design: Andre Klijsen Cover illustration: detail of Madhu Khanazad (attr.), “Plato charms the wild animals with music” in Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami, British Library Lay-out: Crius Group Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. ISBN 978 90 8728 386 5 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 432 2 (e-PDF) NUR 680 © Neilesh Bose / Leiden University Press, 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and the author of the book.

Table of Contents

Foreword 7 Patrick Manning Chapter 1. Introduction: Globalization, Global, and World as Keywords for History and Literature

17

Neilesh Bose Chapter 2. Can we have a global literary history?

57

Alexander Beecroft Chapter 3. World History Needs a Better Relationship with Literary History

75

Jonathan Arac Chapter 4. Re-Gifting Theory to Europe: The Romantic Worlds of Nineteenth-Century India

93

Kedar Kulkarni Chapter 5. Violence, Indenture and Capitalist Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

115

Nandini Dhar Chapter 6. Vacant Villages: Policing Riots in Colonial India

151

Radha Kumar Chapter 7. The Neoplatonic Renaissance from the Thames to the Ganges

169

Jos Gommans Chapter 8. Radical Presentism

201

J. Daniel Elam Chapter 9. Liberating World Literature: Alex La Guma in Exile Christopher J. Lee

219

6 table of contents

Afterword 245 B. Venkat Mani About the Authors

253

Index 255

Foreword Patrick Manning

Abstract This Foreword explores the interplay of world history and world literature in India after World History. The editor guides eight authors in discussing four key issues. In critique of global humanities theory, the book shows the advance of literary scholars in global theory, balanced by inclusive empirical historical studies. World-making is advanced as a technique for global interpretation; past and present examples clarify the concept and its value. Third, the global debate over Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy demonstrates how a single work can focus wide debate. And the “global,” a twenty-first-century perspective, is shown to be balanced by an emerging “planetary” perspective. The book links these interpretive issues through well-chosen “meeting points” in world literature and history, at which varying perspectives contend in debate. In sum, the Foreword presents the work as opening a path for grappling with multiple perspectives in understanding the global and the planetary.

Keywords: World literature; world history; keywords; theory; world-making; Ibis trilogy; meeting points; global; planetary

Literature and history, the two largest fields in the humanities, now give significant attention to worldwide dimensions of their disciplines. This volume, with five essays by world literary scholars and five by world/global historians, explores issues that criss-cross the contested terrain of globalization. Historian Neilesh Bose, the leader in assembling this productive exchange, saw the benefits in focusing the book on India—long a nexus of global discourse and institutional diversity— without abandoning the subcontinent’s heritage of area-studies analysis. The result brings a fresh look at the global, with a wealth of materials. The volume draws on two centuries of Indian writing in global literature and history—a nexus of global thought from numerous perspectives. For scholars in India as elsewhere, a core concern within the two expanding disciplines is contemporary globalization, with its social and environmental transformations and crises. At the same time, authors and critics in both fields are expanding the scope of their work along temporal, spatial, and topical axes. Attention to topics beyond elite dominance creates space for such issues as the lives of commoners, the complexities of gender, the significance of ancient antecedents, assumptions on human

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agency, and the limits of nature. Each of the resulting perspectives necessarily entails challenges to the priorities of others, so that a growing range of issues now contends for space in the understanding of the global. The expanding scope of topics and perspectives in the humanities threatens to fragment the discourse, raising fears for its coherence among some observers. Dependably, however, the human search for connections reasserts itself. World history and world literature identify unexpected links within the historical record and the human imagination, the two great archives on which history and literature draw. Such exploration requires new skills, notably how to debate numerous perspectives at once and how to be at once global and specific. The confluence of world history and world literature provides a privileged arena in which to select priorities in this era of expanding inclusivity. India and the Indian Ocean world stand out as a locus of innovation and debate in both literary and historical perspectives. In a multifaceted introduction, Bose artfully guides readers across four related issues addressed in the chapters: theory in the unfolding of world literature and world history; world-making as a technique for global interpretation; the debate over Amitav Ghosh’s smash-hit Ibis trilogy; and the “global” as a twenty-first-century perspective. Beyond these main themes, Bose introduces the concept of “meeting points” of world literature and history, at which varying perspectives contend in debate. Beginning with theory, Bose takes the lead in surveying the ancestry and theories of world literature and world history over more than two centuries. Much is new in each field, so that theory is a mix of old and new. In the contemporary age, three outstanding literary theorists—Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch—articulated alternative visions that enlivened their field, in a pattern that anticipated what Bose would call meeting points. Bose reconsiders the initial collection linking world literature and world history, edited by May Hawas, and finds that its disciplinary overviews show literature and history to explore globalization along different paths, although Bruce Robbins, in the same volume, made a plea for concerted work in the humanities on the issue of violence.1 Bose here pursues the directions of theory in the two fields, balancing the work of scholars from the North Atlantic, India, and the Indian diaspora. He highlights historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s lifetime of research on mid-level interconnections in the globalization of the early modern world, especially in the Indian Ocean world; he draws on the literary scholarship of Dilip Menon and B. Venkat Mani; and he recalls Ramayatar Sharma’s voice from the early twentieth century, recounting the genesis of the world and narrating its changes to the present. Bose’s comparison of the two fields shows that theory in world literature is more articulated than in world history, especially in that interpretive statements in world literature are more backed up by the specifics of key texts.2 As for theory in history, luminaries

foreword 9

have not dominated the field since the days of E. P. Thompson, nor has graduate study given much attention to world history. Nevertheless, historical study has steadily expanded its scope, providing evidence and analysis to support global interpretations. Bose confirms the latter point through studies of empire, arguing that recent authors intend to decenter and provincialize the view centered on extractive British and French empires. The new works focus on earlier empires worldwide, on linking modern empires to capitalism, and on the concerns of the colonized. Three early chapters of this volume pursue the theme of origins and theories. Jonathan Arac, in a wide-ranging, autobiographical tour, retraces his life of studies in world literature and world history of the North Atlantic during the past two centuries. He is the one author besides Bose to review both fields, noting for instance that as the scope of history expanded, the cultural work of historians became weaker. Arac focuses especially Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946), the founding analysis of realism in world literature, providing a convincing portrayal of Auerbach’s way of picking out the most ‘realistic’ of texts through the detail of their representations. Arac then steps beyond his own broad expertise in European and American studies to give an enthusiastic account of Sheldon Pollock’s analysis of cosmopolis in his study of Sanskrit literature.3 Yet Arac scolds Pollock for neglecting Auerbach, especially since Pollock’s portrayal of early vernacular literature follows Auerbach’s model for discussing Dante. Bose too grapples with Pollock, arguing that Pollock’s nostalgia for the Sanskrit cosmopolis makes him a biased critic of nations, “keeping in place an airtight division between premodern and modern worlds.”. These critiques reveal a meeting point, linking three perspectives in the portrayal of communities over the centuries. In a different approach to theory, Alex Beecroft treats literary history as a container for theory. He provides an impressive exploration of histories of world literature, then deploys them to locate inspiration and cautions for his own effort. His projected history of world literature in six periods, from the first millennium BCE to the present, turns at major world-literary events of cultural interaction, narrating regions of literary activity and interaction of texts within literary periods, yet abstaining from imposing an encompassing narrative. Kedar Kulkarni’s chapter brings back to life the nineteenth-century literary theory of Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, whose writings revealed the two visions of literature in Marathi poetry, expressing them in terms of his deep reading of European literary criticism. Kulkarni, in his appreciation of Chiplunkar, argues that the theorist’s insights constituted a “regift” to the colonizer, an ironic response to the Eurocentric claim that colonialism was a “gift.” These instances show that literary theory is assembling global perspectives with increasing energy and breadth. ‘World-making’, the second of Bose’s four cross-disciplinary themes, identifies a promising path to global interpretation in the humanities. Bose treats world-making

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not as a structured analytical framework but as “a lens into the making of literature as well as an approach to thinking about the world as an object.” In intellectual history, Bose relies on historian Ayesha Ramachandran to remind readers that Nathaniel Fairfax coined the term ‘world-making’ in late seventeenth-century England.4 Ramachandran’s volume arguably launched current historical study of world-making: she traces world-making by early modern writers and also presents her own model of their world of conceptualization.5 It becomes clear that the agents of world-making can be either the protagonists of literary and historical works or the authors of texts, each envisioning a world as they think it is or might be. Bose’s passages on world-making provide the reader with guidelines for use of the approach: he supports Ramachandran’s argument that early modern world-making was an ‘imaginatively ambitious response to forces of entropy and disorder’.6 Bose turns to philosopher Nelson Goodman, whose concise 1978 book has remained a touchstone in conceptualizing world-making, then links Goodman to Duncan Bell, who adopted an explicitly world-making approach to the study of global intellectual history, focusing on the rise of neoliberalism.7 In my opinion, an observation by historian Bruce Mazlish adds a qualification relevant to worldmaking. Mazlish, in analyzing the eighteenth-century concept of civilization, showed how the initial ‘reflective’ and open-ended study of civilization, from the 1750s to the 1790s, was displaced in Napoleonic and subsequent times by an ‘ideological’ effort to narrow the concept of civilization into a tool for building empire and European commercial dominance.8 This distinction between reflective analysis and ideological use of key concepts may be generally valuable in the discourse on worldmaking.9 That is, Bose’s comments on the worldmaking interpretation by ethnographer Dorinne Kondo and others, emphasizing the reflective side of these studies of globalization, contrast with the ideological worldmaking of neoliberalism.10 Bose mixes writers who apply explicitly the logic of world-making with those who apply it implicitly, opening the door to discussion of other works. In a chapter presenting what amounts to a dual exercise in world-making, historian Jos Gommans seeks to introduce Neoplatonism as “a new category in comparative and connective global history.” Gommans, seeking to link South Asia to the world without tying his analysis to modernity, turned to Neoplatonism. His chapter presents two skillfully condensed world-making narratives of Neoplatonist philosophy. The first traces continuities from Plotinus to the twentieth century; the second focuses on the global “Renaissance” of Neoplatonism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing parallels of Tudor-Stuart England and Akbar’s Mughal state to convey the eclectic and absorptive properties of Neoplatonist thought. To these I add my own exercise in world-making, which charts the beginnings of human language. New evidence suggests that early humans shifted rapidly, some 70,000 years ago, from limited vocal communication to syntactic language,

foreword 11

complete sentences, and worldwide migration. Following Bose’s lead, I seek to construct a tale of world-making that argues for the extension of global humanities to very early times. The breakthrough came, I argue, from children of ages from seven to fifteen, who played word games, getting past monosyllabic nouns and verbs by creating the syntax that linked words into full and meaningful sentences.11 Humans had previously voiced individual words but lacked the social organization to assemble words into syntactic sentences. The team of young Founders (as I call them) created common consent and a linguistic community—the first social institution of humanity. That institution grew from perhaps a dozen friends at the start to 100 speaking members after 15 years. The Founders were able to maintain their group, expand the specifics of language, bring in younger children, and become leaders of their society as they matured. Within three centuries the speaking population, organized into language communities of roughly 150 each, had grown and absorbed others to reach some 10,000 in population. In this new world of complete sentences and complete thoughts, one could convey details about the past and future as well as the here and now. Individuals gained membership in this institution only through years of practice in speaking. The institution was democratic at base, in that all shared the language and the possibility of adding innovations to it. Groups of speaking individuals then formed more institutions, first to strengthen the language community and then to design and implement further tasks. Rituals strengthened community identity, marriage alliances linked households, and workshops of specialists created visual art. Steadily, these processes brought absorption of all human populations into speaking communities that settled all the continents. World-making is a device for envisioning global dynamics that can greatly facilitate global discourse in this and other arenas. Filling in this story will rely heavily on imagination and literary techniques. Even if it is a strain on humanities disciplines to characterize this scantily documented early time, literary approaches to the early human experience may be deeply revealing, by exploring the agency and questioning of humans who could at last understand and misunderstand each other in explicit dialogue. In his third introductory emphasis, Bose turns to a remarkable achievement in world literature, Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. The Ibis, Ghosh’s vessel for this world-historical epic, sailed from Calcutta to Mauritius at the time of the Opium War, and its human cargo included characters representing every nineteenth-century social tension. Bose notes comparisons and links of Ibis to literature on the nineteenth-century Atlantic but also Ghosh’s extensive reading in Asian studies. Nandini Dhar’s insightful chapter on the initial volume of Ghosh’s trilogy, Sea of Poppies, emphasizes the issue of ‘capitalist realism’. She criticizes binary visions of past and present: realism, as she sees it, must be diachronic. In comparison with vernacular-language Indian realist novels of the 1930s, she shows how Ghosh

12 patrick manning

sustained that tradition, chronicling both gender and indenture in far more substantial form as he wrote in the twenty-first century. Indeed, Ghosh’s literary imagination anticipated historical research, notably in treating indenture as a significant element of capitalism rather than as an irrelevant side-issue. In other reviews, two academic roundtables brought a mix of interpretive admiration and specialist critique for Ibis. In the American Historical Review, historians acknowledged the success in linking global regions with literary characters yet added the defensive note that Ghosh had passed over the vast historiography on slavery and indenture. In the Journal of Asian Studies, discussion focused on intra-Asian histories, acknowledging that Ghosh’s broad canvas conveyed a pan-Asian story that is not available in segmented historical works. Ghosh’s Indian Ocean epic, though by no means definitive, continues to crystallize the interplay and debate of global perspectives. In a fourth general point, on “the global,” Bose opens a meeting point at a broader scale by setting the discipline of global studies in parallel to world history and world literature. He traces the early formulations of Arjun Appadurai and Raymond Williams and the ongoing update of Williams’ Keywords, with attention to “global.” Chapters of this book reveal the influence of global studies, for instance on violence: Nandini Dhar cites examples of the numerous forms of colonial violence in Sea of Poppies; Radha Kumar traces a South Indian narrative to show how police violence became integrated into colonial life. Both respond to the urgings of Bruce Robbins to give attention to violence in literature, though the authors wisely stop short of portraying violence as a monocausal source of social change.12 Twentieth-century anticolonialism has regained attention as a global issue, yet through sharply different methodologies. Literary scholar J. Daniel Elam deploys M. K. Gandhi’s version of Bhagavad Gita to introduce Elam’s standpoint of radical postcolonial studies, centering on the discipline of philology. Historian Christopher Lee explores the anticolonial outlook of the South African writer Alex La Guma, showing that his twenty years of exile led him to a mix of writings in fiction and especially non-fiction—what Lee calls ‘distant writing’—that built him a global as well as South African audience. Linking the approaches of Elam and Lee to Adom Getachew’s worldmaking approach might yield a kaleidoscopic meeting point on anticolonialism.13 Finally, historical studies of the global have included several major oceanic histories, especially on the Indian Ocean, where it has included an emphasis on universality and cosmopolitanism.14 Nile Green, in response to the discourse on Ibis, emphasizes that to be global is not necessarily to be universal or cosmopolitan.15 He displays the perspectives of those who opened the print world of Indian Ocean vernacular languages, to challenge the notion of a “cosmopolitan” Indian Ocean, identifying a great range of outlooks and origins in the profusion of texts after 1850. Neilesh Bose emphasizes in addition that the Indian Ocean

foreword 13

is at once a region in itself and a component of a global order—rather than “a counter-site to Euro-Atlantic centered capitalist globalization.” India after World History emphasizes the experience and outlooks of India as a guide to the experiences of globalization, the global, and the world. The population— its rich cultural and historical experience—and its insightful scholars in every field provide a solid base from which to consider global humanity. The chapters advance theory and interpretation along several axes in world history and world literature; they enable the location of meeting points at which varying perspectives interact. The expanding scope of both disciplines continues to generate new perspectives. Those perspectives, in their contrasting logic, highlight Sanskrit cosmopolis, literary realism, nationalism, indentured servitude, Neo-Platonist incorporation, Marathi poetry, periodization of world literary history, the beginnings of spoken language, oceanic history, anticolonial impulses, and concerns for environmental change. The strategy of linking them through discourse at meeting points is aimed at creating flexible paths along which world literature and world history can maintain their own trajectories yet be explored in orderly subgroups, leading toward coherence in discourse. Neilesh Bose’s introduction reviews well-selected issues within this great arena: theory in the paradigms of world history and world literature; the approach of world-making; the intellectual and cultural impact of Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy; and the “global” as a keyword for interchange between world literature and world history. The editor has structured the book around a search for topics of discussion linking world literature and world history. He has taken on the role of coaching members of the two disciplinary groups into advancing their thinking and learning through exchange. In a further guideline, Bose commends the approaches in the recent works of Sujit Sivasundaram, Coll Thrush, and Dipesh Chakrabarty—works that pursue the expanding scope in analysis of human agency yet underscore the need to emphasize the constraints of the natural world, in an approach that Chakrabarty has called “planetary.” With India as the base for a detailed discourse linking world literature and world history, this book’s multi-scalar discourse can become a model for expanding such discussions. This exploration of a numerous yet limited set of themes may also lay the groundwork for other regions and scales of interdisciplinary exchange, giving due recognition to new perspectives as they emerge. For the present, at least, the momentum of overall discussion in history and literature leads away from monocausal interpretations and toward inclusiveness. This path may lead toward discovery of methods for grappling with multiple factors and multiple participants in historical processes and literary encounters, expanding our understanding of the global and the planetary.

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Notes 1

B. Robbins, “What world history does world literature need?” in M. Hawas (ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (London: Routledge, 2018), 194–206.

2

Of the overlapping groups of ‘world’ and ‘global’ historians, the global historians have been most cited and perhaps most prolific in their programmatic statements. The sharpest difference between world historians and global historians is that global historians almost never venture before early modern times, while some world historians explore a much deeper past.

3

Arac describes Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men as “a work far from my immediate area of study in which I find great promise for better relations between historical and literary scholarship.” S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).

4

A. Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 8.

5

Ramachandran fixes her study of world-making firmly within the framework of modernity, a framework from which Bose expresses a desire to escape. Ramachandran, Worldmakers, 14–17.

6

Can one distinguish literary and historical fashions of worldmaking? Ramchandran has doubtless developed an opinion on this question. Ramchandran, Worldmakers, 13.

7

N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978); D. Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in S. Moyn and A. Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 257.

8

B. Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); see also P. Manning, “‘Civilization’ in History and Ideology since 1800,” New Global Studies (2021), https://doi. org/10.1515/ngs-2021-0049.

9

Mazlish’s distinction is useful in reconsidering Bell’s argument that neoliberalism can be seen as an exercise in worldmaking. By this logic, Bell is correct in saying that neoliberalism was a campaign for building a certain sort of world—just as capitalist empire and civilization were an equivalent campaign of the nineteenth century—but that each of them was an ideological campaign focused on narrow gains rather than a world-making campaign of reflective analysis. Goodman, however, was arguably not responsible for Bell’s oversimplification of the notion of worldmaking. For a view challenging René Wellek and emphasizing the similarity in nuance of Goodman and Auerbach, see B. Maine, “Erich Auerbach’s ‘Mimesis’ and Nelson Goodman’s ‘Ways of Worldmaking’: A Nominal(ist) Revision,” Poetics Today 20 (1999): 41–52.

10

A. Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

11

P. Manning, A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 36–61.

12

B. Robbins, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). For a social-scientific effort to explain society through violence, see D. C. North, J. Wallis, and B. R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

13

Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire.

14

S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

15

N. Green, “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123 (2018): 846–874.

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Works Cited Bell, Duncan. “Making and Taking Worlds.” In Global Intellectual History, eds. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 254–280. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Green, Nile. “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean.” American Historical Review 123 (2018): 846–874. Maine, Barry. “Erich Auerbach’s ‘Mimesis’ and Nelson Goodman’s ‘Ways of Worldmaking’: A Nominal(ist) Revision.” Poetics Today 20 (1999): 41–52. Manning, Patrick. A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. ———. “‘Civilization’ in History and Ideology since 1800,” New Global Studies, 2021. https://doi. org/10.1515/ngs-2021-0049. Mazlish, Bruce. Civilization and Its Contents. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. North, Douglass C. Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast. Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pollock, Sheldon.The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Ramachandran, Ayesha. The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Robbins, Bruce. Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. ———. “What world history does world literature need?” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, ed. May Hawas, 194–206. London: Routledge, 2018.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Globalization, Global, and World as Keywords for History and Literature Neilesh Bose

Abstract In the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Members of these distinctive disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. Perhaps history and literary criticism are fully divorced, with historians’ focus on primary sources, empiricism, and debates inside historiography distinguishing themselves from literary critics’ focus on close readings of particular texts as well as questions of form, poetics, and manners of reading. In recent years, works such as Martin Puchner’s The Written World, Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, or the three novels that encompass Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, rekindle a variant of history and literature’s embrace in a global register. The publication and reception of such books provoke reflection on how these disciplines fit together, possibly in a new globally situated relationship. This essay probes recent scholarship concerning reflections on global history and world literature in the wake of these developments.

Keywords: World history; world literature; global history; planetary history; worldmaking, globalization

In the twenty-first century, terms such as globalization, global, and world function as key words at the cusp of new frontiers in both historical writing and literary criticism. Members of these distinctive disciplines may appear to be long time intimate lovers when seen from pre and early modern time periods, only to divorce with the coming of Anglophone world history in the twenty-first century. Perhaps history and literary criticism are fully divorced, with historians’ focus on primary sources, empiricism, and debates inside historiography distinguishing themselves from literary critics’ focus on close readings of particular texts as well as questions of form, poetics, and manners of reading. One may witness this divide in the exchange in History and Theory between historian Dirk Moses and the now departed Hayden White on the status of history amongst other forms of representing the past. White

18 neilesh bose

perceives the very nature of history as a scientific genre of truth-telling, whereas Moses vigorously defends the various methods of specialized historical research, signifying the distance between literary critics and historians in our contemporary age.1 Yet in recent years, works such as Martin Puchner’s The Written World, Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch, or the three novels that encompass Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, rekindle a variant of history and literature’s embrace in a global register.2 The publication and reception of such books provoke reflection on how these disciplines fit together, possibly in a new globally situated relationship.3 This volume probes recent scholarship concerning reflections on global history and world literature in the wake of these developments. Though contestation informs both literary critics’ approaches to world literature and historians’ perceptions of global history, it is undeniable that the first articulations of world literature as a concept and the modern discipline of history began in the nineteenth century. Though the term “world literature” is found in the work of Wieland, Schlegel, and Herder, most histories focus on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1827 mention to his discipline Eckermann that he was reading a Chinese novel and that “national literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”4 The career of world literature as a concept began with Goethe in the early nineteenth century but found a different articulation by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Here Marx and Engels do not specify a particular text or type of literature, but point to the rise of the “world market,” and discuss how in the place of local and immediate wants and products, intellectual production flows from material production, as from the “numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”5 Moving from awareness of literatures outside one’s own and the consciousness of a world market, the next and usual iteration of world literature as Weltliteratur appears in philologist Erich Auerbach’s “Philologie der Weltliterature” (1952), an argument against an idealist conception of a world literature in the face of overwhelming particularities in the age of decolonization after World War II. Though other moments in the intellectual history of “world literature” doubtlessly may be found, these three texts and moments (1827, 1848, and 1952) comprise the most referenced sites for opening a discussion of the topic. Literary critic B. Venkat Mani states that discussions of world literature in the academy are usually “cast in the shadow of this Holy Trinity—the Father: Goethe; the Son: Auerbach; and the Holy Ghost: Karl Marx.”6 In the contemporary age, another group of three—Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch—have opened up lively directions for the study of world literature in the current twenty-first century. All three imagine a world literary map, with particular centers and peripheries, energized by metaphors and models drawn from European history or disciplines outside of literary criticism,

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such as economics and the social and biological sciences. Pascale Casanova’s offers an approach to the study of world literature through a “world republic of letters,” in which different types of literature meet via translation in meeting points in Paris. Franco Moretti’s offers systems in the form of graphs, maps, and trees, as well as quantification (as opposed to close reading of particular texts) as an approach to world literature not as a predetermined object of study, but as a problem7. Finally, Damrosch offers an update to earlier approaches, that of the model of circulation, as he interprets world literature as “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language.”8 Generative of a range of critical new directions in world literature scholarship, these three figures have instigated numerous directions and intense critiques regarding the study of world literature from the early twentieth century onward. Whereas critical engagement with the idea of world literature has picked up steam from the early twenty-first century, the subfield of world history in the Anglophone world owes largely to the early twentieth century. One important strand of world history in this register is the work of Arnold J. Toynbee and H. G. Wells.9 Informed by the world wars of the twentieth century, these thinkers aimed at broad synthesis of human history, aimed primarily at a general audience and advocating for peace via learning about the detailed conflicts of the immediate past. Later developments near the close of the twentieth century associated with historian Jerry Bentley and the World History Association (est. 1982) focused on comparative history, mass migration, and long-distance trade, but for the audience of professional historians. In the late twentieth century, scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and others began to formally pursue comparative history as a branch of this sort of world history. Finally, in the late twentieth century the subfield observed a split between “world” and “global” histories. Global history comprised a new agenda, defined and led by Bruce Mazlish, focused on the specific history of globalization and the imagination of the world as a specific unit, manifested in a book series and journals with “global” in the title as opposed to “world.”10 Subsequent developments within the historical discipline have led to synthetic overviews, edited collections regarding global history paradigms, as well as debate in the historical profession.11 World literature as a paradigm has generated a range of critical paths forward in the twenty-first century.12 Viewing world history and world literature together alongside each other appears within much larger inquires in the wake of numerous critical explorations of world literature.13 However, an explicit conversation was staged in the 2018 World History and World Literature Routledge Companion. With introductions by leading practitioners of both disciplines, David Damrosch, and Patrick Manning, the fields have appeared to pursue separate trajectories in the very generation in which globalization, and globally inflected studies have been on the rise. An important milestone in the interdisciplinary meeting point between

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the two disciplines, this companion contains thematic sections on people, networks and methods, and transformations. Individuals studied in the first section include not only the usual suspects like Goethe or Rabindranath Tagore, but figures not normally seen in this context. These include Keshub Chunder Sen (1838-1884), who articulated conceptions of comparative religion and world history in the late nineteenth century and Marian Malowist (1909-1988), the Polish historian and theorist central to Immanuel Wallerstein’s many works in the late twentieth century. Unlike most volumes on the subject, this companion includes sections on the visual arts, such as an extended interview with Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander about her 2013 Parallax, an installation composed of hundreds of digital images, showing a multiplicity of histories though South Asian and other migrant presences in the Persian Gulf.14 Networks and methods as well as transformation comprise the remaining sections of the collection. Though historians and literary critics appear in the collection, it is organized around interdisciplinary lines of vison, obscuring to some degree how historians and literary critics speak to one another. Damrosch opens his contribution by asking if “world literature has a history at all?”15 In addressing this question, he presents a survey of both world literary thought presenting it as a new feature of the early nineteenth century. Regarding its presence as a field of both research and teaching in the contemporary Western academy, Damrosch dates its origin to the decade of the 1990s. During this decade, the appearance of numerous anthologies and collections for students and general readers, as well as Casanova’s 1999 La Republique mondiale des lettres marked off a new phase in formal criticism and teaching of world literature. An important point of intersection for Damrosch between world history and world literature is the method by which selection of illustrative sources and broader synthetic insights are drawn to bear upon the topic. For Damrosch, the most relevant era of world history is the Anglophone tradition of large-scale history writing between the world wars of the twentieth century. Key texts include Wells’ 1920 Outline of History, as well as comparable works by Arnold J. Toynbee and Will and Ariel Durant. What Damrosch identifies as a relevant issue for literary critics to consider from world historical scholarship is the principle of selection and connection between disparate cases, inspired by his reading of Wells and the inter-war work, to advocate for peace amongst nations: “a sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for peace between the nations.”16 This process, as many scholars have identified, has existed at least since Schlözer’s Weltgeschichte nach irhen Hauptheilen im Auszug and Zusammenhang. For Damrosch, reflections on selection and connections from world historical scholarship prompts him to consider the example of the relatively under-researched writer Kukrit Pramoj (19111995), Thai author of novels, histories, and active in numerous other venues such as theatre and activism. He contrasts his life and work to Indonesian Pramoedya

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Ananta Toer, subject of numerous scholarly investigations, as Pramoj “doesn’t fit neatly into the narratives that Western critics typically want to create for third world literature.”17 Pramoj was Buddhist, royalist, and not the sort of figure often studied within frameworks of modern nationalism or available models of world literature. Damrosch advocates not elevating figures like Pramoj at the cost of studying figures like Toer, but declares that “what we need are histories that are open enough to allow the variety of our materials to challenge and modify the aesthetic, political and historiographic frameworks we bring to them.”18 Like Damrosch, Manning identifies the 1990s as a turning point in the field of world literature as a field of criticism as well as the production of world histories. He includes a wider range of historical turning points in the history of world history, including the Histories of Herodotus and Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian as well as work by Rashid al-Din Tabib of the fourteenth century and Voltaire’s eighteenth-century world historical compendia. He joins Damrosch in stressing the inter-war world histories of Wells and Toynbee, as he argues for historians to think seriously about theory and method in world history, as a potential parallel to world literary criticism. Since other specialists in sub-fields of history look to other disciplines for their theoretical toolboxes, such as environmental historians looking to biological and geological theory, or political historians looking to political and social theory, world historians many look to world literary criticism as a potential model to consider approaches to their subfield. Though only suggestive, Manning lists six issues, including the breadth of time and topic in historical analysis, the range of disciplines upon which historians call, the development of hierarchy and network in history, and gender in history.19 All of these topics bring forth particular lines of inquiry and debate, though it is likely world historians would enlarge their horizons by exploring theoretical paths paved by literary critics in any of these areas.20 The meeting point of both fields is taken up by Bruce Robbins, who pleas for literary critics to take histories of violence, coercion, and conquest more seriously. Robbins also urges scholars who care about world literature to think clearly about what sort of histories enable the belief in literature as outlasting or transcending political hegemony. As a critique of recent critical work on the subject, Robbins suggests that “the only world history world literature wants is one that reinforces its sense of autonomy from the social, economic, political, and military structures around it.”21 Rather than simply add more material to the corpus of world literary study, Robbins advocates for more nuanced histories of violence, as well as histories of how anti-imperialism, and understandings of violence across time and space, may inform more nuanced criticism of world literature. Potential insights for new historical and literary-critical research motivated by Robbins’s chapter form the foundation for this volume. This volume builds on the insights of the

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2018 Companion by focusing squarely on current historians and literary critics’ exploration of globalization, global, and world perspectives in the present era.

A Brief History of Recent Global Historical Thought Robbins’ queries open an investigation into world history as a genre as well as the various critical perspectives generated about it. Though the writing of world history holds pre-modern roots, the synthetic world history drawn from multiple regional histories appears to have informed most academic discussion of the field in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A break appears in the 1990s, as “internecine struggles” (in Manning’s terms) begin from the 1990s on the matter of “global” vs. “world” history, though the impulse behind all world histories in this genre have sought to synthesize broad fields as well as generalize at a level beyond particular histories of localities. Critics of the notion of world history as a synthesis of the entire world’s history are easy to find. A range of reflections by the historian of early modern Eurasia Sanjay Subrahmanyam offers important correctives to assumptions about world history in his 2013 lecture at the College de France, “On the Origins of Global History,” a prominent reflection on the genre.22 For Subrahmanyam, the trajectory from Spengler to Wallerstein is but an Anglocentric blindness to the vitality of histories written in the past that aspired to trace worlds or registers outside the local. Subrahmanyam traces the existence of universal histories, as well as global histories written in the mode of “xenology,” or a study of the ethnocentric views and notions of self and other in foreign societies, from the sixteenth century onward. In his rendering, a “xenology” appears from the century Iberian advance onward, associated mostly with João De Barros (1496-1570), who wrote about learning from Asia, as well as various topics about the world from an Iberian perspective. Other “xenologists” of note include Abu Raihan al-Biruni of the eleventh century or Amir Khusrau of the fourteenth century. A break occurs, though, with the rise of the Portuguese, and the new fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ambitions of “putting the space of their explorations into a narrative revolving around their homeland.”23 Through these and diverse examples from the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Subrahmanyam concludes that a useful way to view global history is that of a “minority tendency,” an Oppositionswissenschaft, against national or imperial history. It need not feature grand synthesis, following Toynbee, Spengler, or Schlözer, but could include particular visions of the world (and various hierarchies and conceptions of society) from a particular place. This follows work on sixteenth-century histories that could be typed as “world” as well as responses to the economists’ versions of globalization.24 As he argues in

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these works, world history in the sixteenth century, whether Mughal, or Ottoman, or European, difference and heterogeneity of life is easily apparent, but not in the manner of the trajectory the Anglophone twentieth century. The latter synthetic world history relies primarily on secondary literature and tends to focus on war, the status of the modern West, and a conception of the world flowing from that perspective. Subrahmanyam’s trenchant critiques stick within the realm of early modern sources and histories. One point of departure prompted by realizing this fact is the divide between historians of modern globalization, insistent on a meaningful rupture from a pre-modern into a modern world, and historians who seek to subsume modern periods of history into a larger framework of interactions, encounters, or migrations. This is seen in the distinctions between Crossley and Conrad’s books of the same name—What is Global History?—as Crossley maintains a view encompassing modern and non-modern in her “telling of a story without a center.” She maintains some of the tools of the modern historian in the identification of four areas—divergence, convergence, contagion, and systems—yet maintains a firm placement in worlds outside only modernity. Conrad, in contrast, offers “Structured integration” as the master-key to a global history worth its name, but enumerates recent methods—transnational, comparative, postcolonial, world-systems, and multiple modernity—deployed to understand the history of the modern world.25 Though the critiques of the enterprise remain important to consider, global history as a subfield of the historical discipline has continued to rise in visibility. The most recent collection to display a range of directions by practitioners across the world is Global History, Globally, edited by global historians Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmeier. The editors emphasize how books published with “global history” in the title are rising quickly in the twenty-first century (over 50 in the second half of the twentieth century, over 300 in the first two decades of the twenty-first century) and that seminars and institutes on global history have proliferated in locations across the world. As they state in their opening sentence, “global history seems to be everywhere,” citing institutional developments in European, Asian, and North and South American locales as well as sophisticated and detailed reflections on the genre by practitioners in a range of regions, not only the modern Anglophone West. The book features three sections, about regions, themes, and problems in global history, respectively. Themes include labor history, intellectual history, and migration history, all areas where global historians have made significant advances in recent years. Problems feature the relationships between national history writing and world history writing (inseparable in some contexts, as in parts of East Asia). Other problems historians have identified in writing global histories include the context of “voice” in African history set in global registers, or the role of Australia as a settler society in global history.

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One theme identified by Beckert and Sachsenmeier is that of intellectual history. Moyn and Sartori’s 2013 Global Intellectual History. Stretching across time and space, identifies problems in the conceptualization of a global history itself, mentioning the global as a “meta-analytical,” or historian’s, category, the “global” as an actors’ category, and the “global” as a scale of actual historical process. Following this enumeration of ways of conceiving global history, the editors list various global history methodologies, including a focus on networks, mediating agents, circulation and structure. Of the remaining twelve essays, ten feature original research and two offer concluding reflections in the spirit of interpretive synthesis for the entire book. Chapters feature a range of topics, including studies of Indigenous intermediaries pertinent to the scientific work of Joseph Banks (1743–1820), the intellectual history of the idea of the “Muslim world,” the recasting of modern African history from Hegelian notions of inferiority, and the intellectual milieus informing V. D. Savarkar, a late colonial Indian nationalist. Issues like abstraction, concept universalization, “world-making” and “non-globalization” all receive essay-length deliberations within an exploration of what makes a global intellectual history possible and effective. Critical pushbacks against the enterprise of global history exist in the volume itself, building on the contested role of modernity in world histories. They testify to how the “global turn” is by no means accepted by the field as a whole. Another area of concern is the relationship between iterations of world history and imperial history. In recent years, the study of empire in world history has been re-examined with a view to decentering and provincializing a view solely based on British and French empires of extraction, violence, and occupation. A variety of works aim toward this goal, including Stoler, McGranahan, and Perdue’s Imperial Formations,26 as well as Cooper and Burbank’s Empires and World History: Power and the Politics of Difference.27 These works include comparative studies of empires as divergent as the Roman, the Ottoman, the Qing, the Russian, the Spanish, the Japanese, as well as modern British and French empires within a world historical study. Barkey’s Empire of Difference, a study of the Ottoman Empire in comparative global historical perspective, fits into this tradition through a focus on longevity, resilience, and the meaning and impact of preserving cultural and religious difference in an imperial system.28 These imperial histories do not invalidate the modern historical focus on British and French empires, their relationships to extraction, violence, cultural nationalisms, and ultimately, some form of decolonization and nation-state formation. In both French and British imperial fields, the impact of world and global historical approaches has made a difference in recent revisions of these imperial histories. For British imperial historians, the inclusion of metropolitan and colonial locales and concerns into a shared analytic frame has been the mainstay of historiography

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of the British Empire since the late twentieth century, a feature of the “new imperial history.” French imperial history is currently unthinkable outside of its global historical implications and importance. Both fields also appear inside of conversations about connected and comparative global history, as shown in Thomas and Toye’s Arguing about Empire, a study of imperial rhetoric by French and British Empires near the end of their empires.29 Other works in this genre include Fichter’s British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East30 as well as Smith and Jeppesen’s Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect?,31 both of which stick within a comparative French and British imperial history line of vision. Outside of “new imperial histories” remain important angles into empire via world historical frameworks from political economy and discussions of historical change in twentieth- and twenty-first-century circles, but by non-historians. From Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Kwame Nkrumah, and Samir Amin in the twentieth century, to Julian Go, Usha and Prabhat Patnaik, and J. C. Sharman in our current century,32 empires figure as key formations of the present age. This approach to empire and imperialism relies on a modern capitalist, and extraction-based form, contrasted to the longer world historical view of empires as entities capable of integrating cultural and religious difference into a functional system. Related to historical assessments of empire in a world system is yet another important critique of global history: the potential loss of comprehensive appreciation of local histories. There can neither be a global history from an ‘extraterrestrial’ place, or from a place apart from the space and place from any particular, but there are global historical perspectives that are not limited to a particular national space. An important example of a world historical perspective from the place of India in the early twentieth century is that of Ramavatar Sharma, (1876-1929), a Sanskrit pandit, writer and teacher in Patna. Sharma counted close associations with Indologists George Thibaut, and the Sanskrit scholar Ganganath Jha. In the early twentieth century, he wrote two remarkable texts in the early twentieth century that compel examination in any study of world literature and world history. These both feature a narrator, Mudgaranand (macejoy). In one, a didactic tract partially in Sanskrit and partially translated in Hindi, Atha Srisatyadevakatha, or “The Narration of the True God,” Sharma offers a genesis of the world, a world history through a discussion of the four yugas in Indian mythology (including the arrival of Buddhism), in the context of addressing the question of how India should free itself from colonial rule. The other is a Mud-garanand caritvali, or “The Biographies of Mudgaranand.” This one is a biography of the fictional saint, who is an 11,832-yearold native of the planet Varuna, or Neptune, and spent 8,000 years on earth and left recently. As a fantastical character, the text introduces him and then offers an account of the history of the world, starting with India in the time of the Ramayana,

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but touring through ancient civilizations such as Egypt, and then the history of Rome, Greece, as well as histories of Christianity and Islam. He mentions that a history would become too long to tell in full, like many Mahabharatas, so quickly includes a few important figures, such as Cromwell, Columbus, and Vasco de Gama, but also the Japanese attacks on Russia, the 1911 Chinese republican revolution, and more. This text offered 16 chapters of history but in addition to other sections, about the nature of India and its decline. As Hans Harder has argued, the work is “an attempt to narrate a kind of world history in traditional, non-colonial terms, or in a mythological narrative frame.”33 It uses Indianized forms for non-Indian proper names (Alik Chandra for Alexander, Abrahma for Abraham) as well as places other societies in an Indian frame of reference, by explaining varna distinctions in Roman society, or asserting that Hercules and Hannibal are avatars of Hanuman. Sharma also refuses the distinction between history and myth, as well as ventured deeply outside of Indian materials to write histories of the world. The latter part would be quite unique for his time, as though historians in colonial India engaged with various forms of history, including Indian mythology, rarely if ever did Indian historians venture to write world histories from such a basis. Also, the more well-known Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, a series of letters written to his daughter Indira from a prison in 1930s relies fully on H. G. Wells’ Outline of History as a model. The existence of Sharma’s work demonstrates that imagining world history as a method of making sense of a particular moment in time was not relegated only to the modern West.34 Finally, the fact of predominantly male historians leading conversations and criticisms of global history as well as citation practices compels attention within the context of critics of global history. As argued by Pamela Crossley and by Amy Stanley, a “genteel misogyny” is at work in much critical discussion of world and global history in the present age.35 Early critics of Eurocentric histories, such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, all decentered prominent European male protagonists in search of new frameworks as well as new narratives for world histories outside the West. However, as Stanley points out, histories written in this way often replace with male-centered narratives that relegate women, especially before the twentieth century, to minor or offstage roles. This development sits alongside the fact that women such as Lara Putnam and Saidiya Hartman in addition to Stanley herself,36 have definitively pushed boundaries of global histories through pain-staking research in multiple formats, centering female protagonists in history yet are rarely cited as doing global history. Furthermore, in a defense of global history as a paradigm, Richard Drayton and Ray Motadel cite thirty-five women but over twice as many men.37 As Crossley has mentioned, the directions of criticism leveled at work framed as “global” often provide

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misleading rhetorical gestures about the scholarship of women, demonstrating a “genteel misogyny” in the ways that global history is understood by male critics of the genre.

World Literature Paradigms in the Twenty-First Century A historical understanding of world literature places the idea of it in a much more limited, and wholly modern time frame. Even though there are many literatures that could fit into a conception of world literature via models of circulation and translation, as Damrosch mentions in 2018, the idea of world literature is a distinctively modern one.38 Numerous critical paths have emerged in the wake of world-literary theorization by Casanova, Damrosch, and Moretti. One points to the limits of the world systems approach, as Dilip Menon argues in his analysis of the writings of Malayalee writer and critic A. Balakrishnan Pillai (1889-1960).39 Pillai wrote about a variety of topics, including Europeans such as Proust and Flaubert as well as Mayakovsky, Ibsen, as well as advocated translations of world literature into Malayalam. For Menon, Pillai imagined “a Europe that in his eyes reflected a political sensibility committed to a radical, egalitarian modernity.”40 Pillai’s approach to literature and his vast range rendered him a “locally rooted cosmopolitan,” a figure who is difficult to capture in models of world literature subordinated to models that center world systems or networks of world literature. Menon’s account of his extraordinary figure’s intellectual history, seeks to transcend theories of world literature remain tethered to a “recourse to world systems theory with its neat lateral hierarchy of core and periphery” and its reliance on “earlier teleologies, linearities, and a notion of unitary time.”41 A systems approach is adopted, updated for the twenty-first century, by the Warwick Research Collective in one of the recent theoretical discussions of world literature. In their 2015 definition of world literature as “the literature of the world system—of the modern capitalist world system,”42 yet including a sense of “combined and uneven development,” based on a conversation from Engels, to Lenin, Trotsky, and finally Jameson, and Moretti. This framework is a lens through which literature “of the world-system” would be analyzed. The authors further specify that world literature should be hyphenated as “world-literature,” referring specifically and only to those works with critique a modern world system, not any or all literature in or of the world.43 Menon ends his study of Pillai and his related works by concluding that it was possible to “argue for a difference without hierarchy, create histories that were not subordinated to a universal, and to inhabit a place where individuals were not subsumed in collectivities like the nation.”44 Though unique for his time, Pillai’s works and Menon’s framing of it as an expression of local cosmopolitanism offers

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a useful context against which to think about subsequent work in world literature studies, such as that of Aamir Mufti’s Forget English!, which argues for the centrality of institutions and power in the making of a world literary paradigm. Institutions of Orientalism in India, created in the same historical era as Goethe’s revelation to Eckelmann, form his origin point for a history of world literature. His argument may be read as a critical engagement with periodization, shifting Casanova’s gaze from the modern postcolonial moment and the late twentieth century to the time period of the East India Company’s rise in Bengal and the concomitant rise of formal Orientalist institutions as the origin of world literature as a paradigm. Not only did it appear in the same time as the European historical milestones (Goethe, Marx/Engels) a focus on Orientalist institutions shows how the notion of a world literature depended on classifying particular literatures as national in a constellation of literatures. Creating a “national” in the context of an emergent “world” entailed destruction of older and varied traditions of reading, writing, and oral literary cultures.45 Mufti’s argument may be read alongside the recent Hallaq’s Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge, a full-scale critique of the social sciences, in which entire disciplines are rendered impotent given the Eurocentrism inherent to their manifestations.46 Translation forms a major site of debate amongst scholars of world literature, such as Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013) and Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015).47 Walkowitz updates Apter’s focus on the “untranslatable,” centering works that are “born translated,” or those that were meant to cross language and form in their very constitution. Seeing a genealogy of the “born translated” in canonical works such as Don Quixote, she discusses how “born translated” literature across media (including digital and visual media) help reframe and adjust discussion of the paradigm of world literatures. Scholars should pay primary attention, in Walkowitz’s account, to works born not for modernist singular nationalist consumption in a particular language, form, or place, but cross boundaries through their very form. Other approaches to the subject do not only link the concept of world literature to Orientalism. Three particular efforts in the discussions of world literature by literary historians cast the scholarly gaze in a different direction. Alex Beecroft’s Ecology of World Literature, which fully and critically explored literature’s relationships to environments, as well as distinctions within traditions. Beecroft argues that “any given literature must, I believe, be understood as being in an ecological relationship to other phenomena—political, economic, sociocultural, religious—as well as to the other languages and literatures with which it is in contact.”48 He offers six models—the epichoric, the panchoric, the cosmopolitan, the vernacular, the national, and the global—to understand ecologies of literature. The latter model, of

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what Beecroft calls a “plot of globalization” through the study of particular novels written in the twenty-first century, relies on modern and contemporary models of globalization as well as narrative strategies to understand them. Any model of globalization must imply or point to some notion of historical framework to make sense of globalization. Another direction is taken by B. Venkat Mani, who argues for conceiving world-literary thinking as a pact with books.49 Moving emphasis away from the focus on the dominance of English, or economic globalization, or market or network driven models, to think about world literature as “bibliomigrancy,” or a pact with books. Though in agreement with Mufti on the centrality of Orientalist institutions to the idea of world literature, Mani traces the specific history in the site of the German speaking world, from the physical circulation of books in the from the early nineteenth century through the present day, allowing for studies of book history, censorship, philology, libraries, and digital technologies of literary production. These don’t change how world literature is “historically conditioned, culturally determined, and politically charged”50 but allows for the reading of world literature as a site of transformation, outside only academic readings of literary texts. Though such readings are included in Mani’s account, he also meditates on the act of reading itself, as “is inherently connected with bibliomigrancy, of accessibility or inaccessibility to intellectual and imaginative labor of texts from elsewhere by readers from elsewhere.”51 Through centering the German case well beyond canonical moments (1827, 1848, or 1952) or sticking only to literary texts discussed by academic critics, Mani offers a route toward thinking about world literature outside only a critique of Eurocentrism or the many models attempted to think world literature in the era of contemporary globalization. Another potential route forward in the emplacement of world literature and world history in conversation is Sheldon Pollock’s magnum opus The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. This detailed investigation of culture, language, and power in premodern India with reference to Sanskrit material suggests an approach toward both world literature and world history. Pollock is grounded in a mission to understand “the meanings of cosmopolitan and vernacular in South Asia before modernity.”52 Looking at the history of Sanskrit and its expansion in the “vernacular millennium” of roughly 500 to 1500 CE, he posits a model of culture and power mediated by new forms of language use and new forms of literature encased in Sanskrit cosmopolis, showing how culture and power blend together in historically dynamic ways. It suggests that changes in language use and the forms of language suggest inform changes in political power that cannot be tied easily to a retrospective vision of India’s past that lines up with national demarcations of the modern world. The Sanskrit cosmopolis include a replicability of references, a “function of a different, plural, premodern logic of space.”53 Pollock’s focus on this

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premodern logic in the Sanskrit cosmopolis is to learn about how “people conceptualized macro spaces in the past, and what work in the spheres of culture and power such conceptualization was meant, or not meant, to do.”54 It is the mistaken appropriation of premodern pasts that form for Pollock, “one of the deadly weapons of nationalism and a source of the misery of modernity.”55 The assumption that modernity is so miserable—is it miserable for all?—is the foundation of Pollock’s apparatus, thereby stopping his investigation with the rise of modern literary cultures, ironically keeping in place an airtight division between premodern and modern worlds Not only do “vernacular” languages and their literary cultures in the modern world, such as Bengali, Urdu, or Tamil, all of which hold detailed literary histories that cross lines of premodern and modern, but the life of Sanskrit itself holds a detailed itinerary in the era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. The global historian and the critic of world literature therefore are left without tools to tackle the modern, outside these assumptions. An area where it is clear that Pollock relies on a particular depiction of modernity is his section titled “Nationalism, or Indigenism with too much history,”56 which lays out a position on these terms from a premodern standpoint. He places the modern world in either “civilizational” or “nationalist” camps, especially when seen from the vantage point of holding privileged access to premodern materials from his standpoint. Viewed from his vision of the premodern world, notions of “indigeneity” appear nonsensical to Pollock. “No form of culture can therefore be “indigenous”; that term…is only the name we give to what exhausts our capacity for historicization. When taken as anything more than this, the idea inhibits our perceiving that all cultures participate in what are ultimately global networks of begging, borrowing, and stealing, imitating, and emulating—all the while constructing themselves precisely by sublating this history and affirming a specious autogenesis.”57 This may well be true for an imposition of a modern framework of indigeneity onto a premodern set of materials, but does such a position help or hinder the understanding of literature and culture in the modern world itself when “global networks of begging, borrowing, and stealing, and emulating” cry out for more than simply a dismissal of claims to indigeneity? The political powers that lie underneath who gets to beg and who gets to borrow must appear in any consideration of global history and consequently world literary criticism. The era of modern nationalisms, especially those in settler colonial contexts amidst claims of indigeneity of various kinds, generates forms of literary culture as well as political positionalities that must be engaged with in their own particularities and not dismissed as either only nationalist or civilizationalist. The links between culture and power in the modern world—presumably the “world of men”—and the imagination of worlds that may be modern, await further investigation.

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Finally, Francesca Orsini, who though critical of the initial wave of world literary superficiality, argues for research in “multilingual locals” and through an appreciation of significant geographies (bounded and specific) that emerge once multilingual locals are understood, as opposed to a world from above. In her own scholarship, Orsini has focused on the region of Awadh in early modern northern India and literary cultures in Sanskrit, Persian, and Hindi. Through readings of particular aspects of texts, methods of learning and writing as well as oral cultures, Orsini argues that though “multilingual locals” may not fit the systems model, “their codes and trajectories[to] help us think about local and “global” in more complex and accurate ways”58 than current models of world literature allow for. Orsini and her collaborators Karima Laachir and Sara Marzagova propose a focus on South-South comparisons, places metropole-colony axes as only one many, citing multilingualism as the basis for thinking world literature as opposed to circulation, networks, or world systems.59 Recent advances in the study of world literature since the 2018 companion feature Baidik Bhattacharya and Auritro Majumdar.60 Both continue in the wake of Mufti’s intervention, by further exploring how the world literature paradigm functions not in its origins but through various iterations of it across time and space. For Bhattacharya, it is best understood through a study of “Anglophony,” which signals a focus not on unmasking the Eurocentric and Orientalist origins of the notion of world literature nor aims to “forget English,” but rather swim in the sort of Englishes produced by postcolonial writers. These Englishes show schizophrenia, divided loyalties, multiple traditions, and ambivalent responses to national canons, as “Anglophony conjures a map not of English or England but of imperial geography.”61 Majumdar starts not with the method of deconstruction but of focusing squarely on those iterations of the world literature concept, in Rabindranath Tagore in 1907, and Mao in 1942, that mobilized a range of sentiments and politics far from that of the Orientalist center. This is then traced through other moments, adding up to a study of “peripheral nationalisms” from various parts of the world, all of which mobilize some concept of world literature within the context of literary activism. As he concludes his argument with a note on how a study of such peripheral internationalisms help render particular manners of reading in the past more visible, he states that “peripheral internationalism takes as its goal to render the demotic figure more and more legible.” Furthermore, the job of studying world literature features capturing how the “struggles of the marginalized, in various parts of the world…articulate a vision of another world that is possible.”62 This task of articulating the vision of another, potential future world, far from subsuming local and particular iterations of literature into a broader paradigm of literature via models of circulation or networks, appears to be the task of many literary critics in the present day.

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World-making One framework potentially useful for the assessment of both world literature and globally situated histories is that of world-making, as a lens into the making of literature as well as an approach to thinking about the world as an object. Though skepticism about the ability for “world-making” to encompass worlds outside the modern West, the notion of “world-making” does hold a complex intellectual history outside only the recent past. Identifying a proper intellectual history of world-making is beyond the scope of this volume, but directions from three sites in humanist scholarship compel attention for thinking through the nexus of world history and world literature. One way to approach world-making is through a broader intellectual history outside only its potential normative dimensions in modern world literature. Ayesha Ramachandran traces its trajectory from sixteenth century and particular world-makers from Fairfax onward. Fairfax, Prior, and Hume, all showing how the world was made but also signified a creative process, of being a world-maker, a world-wright. World makers, for Ramachandran, highlight Homo Faber, or man as maker. World was imagined as a totality by a variety of thinkers, whose conceptions need not tend toward empire or domination, but rather held a radical charge in them, an alternative order, an alternative to empire. She does this through readings of the Mercator Atlas from the late sixteenth century, to philosopher Montaigne, to writers like Milton and Descartes, as they all “established habits of thought that formed the bases of world-making across a variety of disciplines…that continue to inform ways of encountering the world.”63 Returning to them for Ramachandran shows addresses charges of Eurocentrism, by arguing for a look at provincializing Europe from within, showing how world-making “appears as a courageous, ethically empowering, and imaginatively ambitious response to forces of entropy and disorder.”64 Ramachandran shifts attention away from the neo-Kantian idealist philosopher Nelson Goodman, a popular reference point for world making. Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking explores how social actors construct their own worlds in various ways. He provides four “ways,” including composition/decomposition, weighting, ordering, and deletion/supplementation, as ways social actors construct particular worlds.65 Duncan Bell’s contribution to Moyn and Sartori’s 2013 Global Intellectual History draws on Goodman to further specify how world-making refers to practices that articulate forms of universality. These may be imperialisms, as well as forms of life destroyed by imperialisms. In the post-World War II period, broad intellectual formations such as social science, neo-liberalism, and representations of the planet

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also figure for Bell as “world-making” practices. Bell views “global intellectual history as a species of worldmaking,” a la Goodman. It is not only non-Western (though it may be) but is rather what distinguishes the “perpetual scope of an argument or other act of the imagination.”66 Finally, from the vantage point of interpretive social science, Dorinne Kondo, an anthropologist and performance theorist, examines race and affective violence in U.S. theatre spaces as a way of thinking about world-making. Her Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity engages ethnographic analysis of theatre artists such as Anne Deavere-Smith and David Henry Hwang and their plays, as well as including auto-ethnographic reflection on her own play Seamless. Kondo approaches theatre as a world-making site, given its multisensory engagement with affect, emotion, aural/oral performance, the olfactory, and the visual sites of creativity and labor. She approaches the work of playwrights like Smith and Hwang, whose plays and performances include forms such as memoir, autobiography, comedy, journalism, documentary, and formal well-made play, as a prime candidate for the consideration of world-making. Through a study of text, the industry and economics of theater production, backstage politics, as well as her own auto-ethnographic reflections, she probes “the world-making assumptions of theory and culture” as related to contemporary U.S. sites of race, culture, and difference. Such a study of world-making, though not directly emanating out of either history or literary criticism, marks one of the most recent scholarly deployments of the category. Outside the world of philosophy and literary criticism, historians and political theorists have also engaged in studies of world-making. Adom Getachew, writes of world making in the context of the Black Atlantic thinkers in Worldmaking after Empire. Her world making is “anticolonial world making,” or “the project of overcoming international hierarchy and constituting a post-imperial world.”67 The idea of world-making in such a context brings to mind a host of other approaches to modern history. Yoav DiCapua offers world-making through a study of existential thought in the Arab world. The twentieth century, as seen in the epochal history of Eric Hobsbawm,68 as well as recent efforts in twentieth century envision a world system at play comprehensible via war and financial crises. Two books published in 2018 focused on the twentieth-century world as a unit of analysis. Adam Tooze in Crashed writes of how a decade of financial crises in the early twentieth century changed the world, as a global economic history. Quinn Slobodian in Globalists places the Vienna School and twentieth-century history of that as the prime mover behind a neoliberal global system, with capital and property a part of a borderless world, and decolonization occupied an important place in that history.69

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Ghosh and world historical fiction An important set of work that emerged after most critiques of world literature and most practitioners or critics of world history have leapt to prominence is Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy of novels. The Ibis trilogy an example of recent work produced that crosses these lines in world-historical and world-literary frames. It is, in Burton’s rendering, a “world history from below.”70 The trilogy includes Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire, published between 2008 and 20015. It follows the story of the ship, named the Ibis, from Calcutta to Mauritius, at the opening of the Opium Wars as well as the system of indentured labor based in India which began in the 1830s as the Trans-Atlantic slave system ended. At about 1,700 pages, with dozens of principal characters from very diverse backgrounds, the settings shift from Bihar to China to Mauritius, with the British opium trade in the 1830s to the First Opium War in China as the backdrop. The level of detail offered comprise one aspect of the work making it truly world historical, including nineteenth-century Bhojpuri songs, intricate facts about opium cultivation and sale, the precise language of lascars (Indian sailors), and even pornography in the nineteenth century. Characters range across a spectrum rarely seen in other works of history or literature, from Deeti, a village woman escaping violent marriage and entering the world of indentured labor and mobility in the 1830s and 40s. Other Indians include Neel Rattan Haldar, a disempowered prince losing land and money in the midst of new power players in the Indian Ocean such as Benjamin Burnham, an English evangelical opium trader. Characters well known to the Indian Ocean world of India and China in the early nineteenth century but rarely seen in fiction or in historical work include figures like Ah-Fatt, a half-Chinese, half-Parsi opium addict, Zachary Reid, an “octoroon” escaping America and entering the Indian Ocean via the Ibis, and Paulette, a French orphan brought up in India. If as Subrahmanyam maintains, the “the central objective fact from the point of view of a “global history” at the turn of the sixteenth century was the gradual integration of America with Eurasia and Africa,”71 then the Ibis Trilogy is doing a certain type of historical work that resonates with this early modern impulse. The trilogy compels a reading within frameworks well established for American literature, such as the prominent place Melville and Moby Dick hold in numerous traditions of Anglophone writing and activism. These include works such as African American Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1900) and British Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992), as well as C. L. R. James’ Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953), all of which contribute historical fiction written in the wake of Moby Dick. Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy fits into this tradition, given not only Ghosh’s noted embrace of Melville as a model of sorts, but for his “imperial eclecticism,” a model informing a major swath of American literary criticism. Arac’s innovative critical intervention

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prompts historians and literary critics to consider the ways both historians and area specialists (in this case, through Asian studies, given the detailed work in Indian and Chinese connected histories Ghosh brings to the trilogy) have reflected on the work’s significance. A roundtable in the December 2016 edition of the American Historical Review notes how the textures of history—details of spaces and frameworks usually seen through statistics or staid reportage—are brought to life in ways that manage to do what world histories only wish they could do. These include bring the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds together in characters like Zachary, as well as show how connected the abolition of Trans-Atlantic slavery and the rise of indentured labor from India were via detailed interiority of characters rarely seen in one narrative, if ever in a work of history, together. The pitfalls, as remarked by historians, lie in the perspective undertaken by the work. As noted by Machado, Ghosh has taken a “Bandung-at-sea” Third Worldist approach, leading to errors historians would spot. These include the putting together of indentured laborers and convicts in the same ships, which did not happen. It also includes missing the vast pre-existing networks of indigenous capitalists, slave-traders, and entrepreneurs in the Indian Ocean who likely shaped European empires as much as were shaped by them. They also include ignoring the vast historiography on indentured labor which decouples it from an older, popular notion of it being a “new system of slavery.” Also in some areas, as noted by Frost, particular Europeans are depicted in quite caricatured ways. Ghosh anticipated some areas of historical research that likely would not have been done without his fiction, such as the legal history of violence in colonial contexts, but in the course of making a Bandung-at-sea version of world history, leaves the world of what actually happened, as Robbins urges scholars to think about, behind. A roundtable in the Journal of Asian Studies also in 2016 offers a reflection on the nature of intra-Asian histories offered by the trilogy as well as his Great Derangement, a series of lectures published as a book in 2016. These lectures probe how historians and literary critics may need to reframe their lines of vision given large-scale global climate change.72 The role of Asia, in terms of India-China relationships, as well as sites of brutal colonization and extraction, appear in Ghosh’s fiction and discourses in the Great Derangement in ways historians, usually tethered to particular sites, sources, and questions are unable to access. However, the limits to the intra-Asian, and the broader Asian, histories and perspectives, are also brought forth in this roundtable. Adeney Thomas and Fa-ti Fan, both remark on “whether the category of ‘Asia’ itself might obscure Anthropocenic complexity.”73 The Asia of Bhutan and the Asia of Japan, mentioned by Thomas, as well as the Asia of colonial India in the opium trade and the Asia of Qing China, do not necessarily add up to a coherent Asia. Historians of Asia, though, continue to maintain a focus

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on the local and the particular within some framework, be it national, religious, linguistic/cultural, or otherwise. The historical imagination of future works that seek to connect spaces such as India and China or to grasp the broader footprint of opium production in Asia likely will only be expanded by Ghosh’s fiction and lectures in the Great Derangement, as it may spur historians to paint broader pictures of the past but within more empirically grounded and bounded foundations. The texture of a global perspective—via layers of subalternity, violence, as well as dreams of justice—is one insight gleaned from both Ghosh’s vast oeuvre and the various reactions to the Ibis trilogy.

Global as Perspective From the early twenty-first century, particularly in the Anglophone world, the “global” as a perspective has emerged as a keyword in the social and human sciences.74 Global studies as a feature of the twenty-first century appears as a particular subfield, visible from the 1990s and afterward, beginning with the work of Arjun Appadurai, Aihwa Ong, David Harvey, and others. The human sciences have been animated ever since by a global turn, a “fundamental shift in analytical perspective that requires a thorough retooling of our modernist and disciplinary modes of analysis.” A global turn for many has led to the identification of a “global imaginary.”75 The global imaginary includes nation-states but also non-state actors, organizations, collectivities, processes, and relations, ways of knowing, and modes of interaction that cannot be located in either one site or within a particular region, nation, or other unit. Global does not simply mean big. It is found not only in vast spaces, but in villages, neighborhoods, workplaces, private homes. Global offers conceptualizations of phenomena that don’t fit into neat categories.76 As the self-proclaimed global historian Dominic Sachsenmeier writes, detail and particularity balance out the larger emphasis in global history on macro-level structures, as “the relationship between the global and the local will need to be explored through a myriad of detailed studies…global and transcultural history can be at the very forefront of such an endeavor.”77 Additionally, in literary criticism, the twenty-first century has witnessed a detailed re-evaluation of Raymond William’s Keywords, begun in 2007 as a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and Jesus College, Cambridge. Of the 131 original keywords, a new 50 were added, one of them being “global.” As a continuation of the enterprise of Williams, as well as the Keywords Project, this book maps points of convergence and divergence between literary-critical and historical usages of the term global. Manfred Steger and Paul James, long time theorists of globalization as a concept, recently prepared a “genealogy” of globalization, showing

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how the term pointed toward diverse meanings in its “career as a concept.” These authors show how, contrary to popular assumptions, the term in English has been around since 1930. W. Boyd, a Scottish educator, first used it, as he aimed to convey a holistic view of education, “wholeness, integration, globalization, would seem to be keywords of the new education view of mind.”78 Other usages from the 1930s through the 1990s feature Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition (1958) as well as particular, though not necessarily enduring uses by political actors such as the African American Lucius Harper in 1944, regarding the “globalization” of the problems facing African Americans in the context of war-time segregation. The definition commonly used refers to integrated economic markets and interdependence, usually associated with George Modelski, the political scientist. His 1968 work defines it as the “global layer of interaction substantial enough to support continuous and diversified institutionalization” as well as “global interdependence.”79 James and Steger also track the quantitative amounts via N-Gram tools of titles using the term globalization. Since the early 1990s, titles using the term skyrocket as seen from most databases, with over 350,000 publications from Factiva, over 7,000 from Expanded Academic ASAP, and over 17,000 on EBSCO Host Database.80 The most productive rise appears in the 1980s and 1990s, a time in which the authors claim that prominent scholars of globalization, such as Arjun Appadurai and Saskia Sassen, began to think about and consider the term seriously. Two other developments relevant to such a concept history would include the concomitant career of the term “world history” compared to “globalization.” As titles with the term “globalization” rise in the 1990s and early 2000s, they fall from the 2010s onward. If one were to plot an N-gram with “world history” and “global history,” titles with “world history” rise in the 1920s and 1940s, only to fall slightly during the era of the rise of “globalization.” However, from the 2010s, “globalization” has begun to fall while “world history” continues to zigzag. Substituting “Global History” for “World History” only yields a continuous rise from the 1980s onward, as both global history and world history occupy roughly equal space whereas globalization has skyrocketed from the 1990s through the 2010s, now on the decline. The plotting of these terms on these scales of measurement demonstrates that “globalization” and “global” as opposed to “world” in the twentieth century now orients a scholarly perspective, though world history has not disappeared.81 The most recent journal to display the “global” is Global Perspectives, alive from 2020, an open-access online only journal. This journal is merely the latest to follow others such as the Journal of Global History in 2006, New Global Studies in 2007, and Global Intellectual History in 2015. “Global” is now quite easy to find as a part of explicit academic inquiry. Global Perspectives, particularly the contributions of Arjun Appadurai and Dilip Menon, speak to debates in the study of keywords such as globalization, global, and world. Appadurai defends his Modernity at Large (first

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published 1996) from historian critics by pointing toward historical frameworks, notably connectivity and comparison. What Appadurai constructively suggests in the current era is a comparative study of connectivities (urban, religious, etc.). Using the example of different forms of Buddhism across time and space, such religious networks are prime candidates for the study of globalization. Menon’s response also offers a reflection on these keywords, such as world, defined in 2020 as “not a continuous space and that what we know as history is the emergence and disappearance of connections across time and space.”82 History falters when engaging with globalization because of its obsessions with origins and causality. By looking at art and literature in recent times, globalization becomes a conception of space that is more dispersed than that of nation and territory, as each local is enfolded in a global. Water and oceans appear best suited to think about the global perspective, as “the ocean is a global entity within which multiple connections happen, as opposed to the continents truncated and divided by the idea of nations and borders. Globalization needs to be thought fluidly through water.”83 Literature of the present as well as global histories show histories of spaces made in ways not visible to the nation or the colonial system. From a reading of Global Perspectives’ inaugural edition, it may appear that historians—if defined by a search for causality and chained to verifiable sources—are not the most appropriate candidates to study globalization. The importance of water and the complex nature of spatial configuration in history points to the field of Indian Ocean history and Indian Ocean studies. This subfield of history contains within implicit and explicit gestures toward “world-making” as well as world historical impulses. Conventionally seen as a “world” by practitioners of Indian Ocean histories, “Indian Ocean World Studies” adorn book series, research centers, and journals and book series focused on “Indian Ocean worlds.” Signature contributions in Indian Ocean historiography such as Panikkar’s India and the Indian Ocean predate but coincide with another monumental development in history, that of Fernand Braudel and his focus on the Mediterranean. Philippe Beaujard’s hefty two-volume magnum opus, Le Mondes de l’Ocean Indien (The Worlds of the Indian Ocean),84 captures multiple worlds within the Indian Ocean as units of analysis. Though certainly inspired by Braudel in broad strokes, his 2019 work frames the Indian Ocean not as an alternative world to the Mediterranean but as an entry point into a global historical framework. Nigel Worden’s review of Indian Ocean history offers this insight with reference to the current state of Indian Ocean histories not only speaking to Eurocentrism but potentially reshaping global historical frameworks from an Indian Ocean vantage point.85 Developments in recent years—on subtopics as diverse as spices, Islam, and law to name three areas—distinguish the study of the Indian Ocean from only a reaction to Eurocentrism or European imperial frameworks.86

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Following Nile Green’s trenchant critique of a related issue—cosmopolitanism— in the Indian Ocean, the notion of the Indian Ocean as a counter-site to Euro-Atlantic centered capitalist globalization must be engaged with critically.87 Abdul Sheriff in 2014 calls it “globalization with a difference,”88 whereas Edward Alpers claims it as a part of a new world history, that which builds on older synthetic approaches but yet focuses on connections and comparisons from within regions of the world as opposed to imposed on top of them. Though the materials available in the Indian Ocean context certainly offer important insights for any scholar considering global historical or world literary criticism, the limits and lessons of globalization from other vantage points, such as the emergence and defense of borders, nations and nation-states, and hardened lines around race and religious communities certainly do exist in the history of the Indian Ocean. Borders, boundaries, and violence do exist in the Indian Ocean, tempering any romantic conception of the Indian Ocean as outside of the familiar conditions of nationalism and nation-states. Regardless of how the Indian Ocean is pitched in relation to European hegemony and global history, Indian Ocean as both a site of investigation unto itself—as Indian Ocean history—as well as a component of world historical research has been alive for some time now.89 Recent advances akin to literary and cultural criticism have appeared, featuring a focus on the contemporary. As Srinivas, Jeychandran, and Ng’weno articulate in the culmination of a four-year investigation, their volume Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds points out the various keywords inherent to Indian Ocean studies of the present century, that of relationality, of new networks of memory, of humanistic approaches to the study of the arts and expression, and place making and quotidian life.90 After the rise and intense study of globalization as a concept and after the various approaches to world/global history and world literature surveyed above, do world history (in whichever form) and world literature paradigms studied by literary critics have anything to offer each other? To address these questions, the contributions in this volume offer perspectives within three paths charted from within the meeting space of literary critics and historians animated by questions of globalization in their respective disciplines. Inspired by workshops at Northwestern University in 2017 and the University of Victoria in 2018, the first features essays by Alex Beecroft, Jonathan Arac, and Kedar Kulkarni, all invested in literary criticism that would analyze the historical through updated literary histories or through engagement the historical discipline. Beecroft structures his contribution as a series of reflections on the task of writing a global literary history, including both a history of the idea of world literature, attempts to complicate the idea, as well as models for global literary histories, as an endeavor that ideally would include multiple histories as well as conceptions of literature. Jonathan Arac, in a biographical register, writes of his own training as a literary critic and the

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various ways contemporary world histories often avoid serious contemplation of literary history, as well as a reading of Pollock’s Language of the Gods approach to language, power, and politics, as potential models for new research in world literary and world historical study. This contribution is likely the first extended analysis of Pollock by an Anglophone literary critic. Finally, Kedar Kulkarni’s study of nineteenth-century Marathi sahir poetry as a “re-gift” to colonial Indologists, offers a view into “worlding” that may provide fodder for future research into nineteenth-century global cultural history.91 These chapters speak to how the most recent appraisals of world history and world literature by David Damrosch and Patrick Manning call for more rigorous engagement between the two disciplines. The second thematic features the role of violence within literary and historical frameworks. Nandini Dhar offers an extended reading of the role of violence as well as plantation life in the indentured labor system which followed after the abolition of Trans-Atlantic slavery, in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. Dhar argues that a “capitalist realism” informs the characterization of Deeti, as well as the broader resignation to the time of capital in the novel, necessitating attention to indentured labor as well as global capitalism within readings of this and related novels for Dhar. Radha Kumar’s approach from the discipline of history revolves around epistemic and literal violence in the form of routine and everyday violence, in particular police violence in the wake of riots in colonial India in 1899 and 1918, respectively. Both pieces address Bruce Robbins’ enduring observations about the role of violence in the study of world literature and world history. Finally, three historians—Jos Gommans, J. Daniel Elam, and Christopher Lee— approach the state of global history as a field by probing methodological issues relevant to literary critics interested in world literature and global historians alike. Gommans conducts a study of Neo-Platonism in world history, claiming it as a connective thread in Latinate and Persian courts, across much of the Eurasian world in the early modern period. Gommans argues that Neoplatonic variants of mysticism, the philosopher-king and the philosopher-artist informed a shared political culture of entities like the early Mughal Empire under Akbar (r. 1565-1605) as well as England the early Stuarts. This connected culture for Gommans has fallen out of view due to “academic specialization and a teleological preoccupation with modernity” (31). Gommans therefore enters debates about global history through a revival of rarely used comparative history and historical sociology frameworks, following the work of A. Azfar Moin and Victor Liebermann. On the other end of the temporal spectrum, J. Daniel Elam examines what he terms “radical presentism,” or variants of twentieth-century anticolonial thought on one hand and early comparative philology, both of which deserve fuller examination to advance studies of world literature and world history. Lee analyzes the “exile writings” of Alex LaGuma, a notable anti-apartheid writer and activist. Rather than approach

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his fiction, Lee focuses on a vast amount of non-fiction, including literary essays, book reviews, travel pieces, political tracts, and other such writings to assemble the “written ephemera of exile. Though a study of these works in conversation with his fiction, Lee provides a study of “distant writing and the exilic imagination,” in Lee with the world—of literature and history—in mind. These contributions advance the latest discussions in both world literature and world history outside only modernity and modern world systems. These chapters show consciousness of the debates about world literature and world history yet are not chained to any one version of either paradigm. World literature and global history may, as Ghosh mentions in The Great Derangement and implies in conversations about his most recent novel Gun Island, find ways back together after a long modernist divorce, as histories focused on bounded nation-states, or empires may give way to bigger, deeper, and more imaginative histories that focus on non-human agents such as changing ecological forces that compel people to move and live in ways that aren’t easily understandable by older models of history tied to nation or locality. Whether the best way to capture this sort of history not tethered to place is best seen as “global” or “world” likely will remain a topic of contention. As pursued in many works of Minae Mizaumura, especially her most recent An I-Novel,92 is not the imagination of an entire world, or engagement with abstract world systems, but the posing of questions via fiction that relate to the very hegemony of English and Eurocentric models of the imagination and the literary form that compel attention from literary critics and historians alike. The book raises questions about being national without being chauvinistic, being local without being provincial, and using identity as the beginning of a discussion rather than end of it. Mizamura’s work is possibly the prime candidate for the exploration of world literature in its most powerful forms in the twenty-first century, as it both combines a translation of a Japanese text into English but meditates on particularity and untranslatability. For literary critics and world historians alike, the work points to a need for both literary critics and historians to think broadly about their objects of study as well as to historicize the markers of difference taken for granted in much scholarship. World historical thought in the twenty-first century appears to have revived with the work of Patrick Manning and Kris Manjapra.93 These two historians who have produced scholarship in a self-consciously world-historical register look at history in a manner that is not purely local and also aspire to think of history in globalized terms. For Manning, world history features a synthesis of human behavior and activity since the beginning of recorded time, yielding a “human system.” In a work of extraordinary synthesis of numerous disciplines across the social sciences, from archaeology, to biology, to the history of religions, Manning provides a work

42 neilesh bose

that combines aspects of the Wellsian focus on synthetic history for the sake of betterment of the world, as well as an argument about the nature of the human system, defined by Manning as the processes of biological, cultural, and social evolution, all of which add up to the “human system.” Manning traces the history of the human system from the early hominins to the present, via process of evolution, migration of humans, the creation of social institutions, and the interplay between humans and Gaia, the overall system of life on Earth. Manning opens with four structuring questions, regarding human behavior “as a system,” as well as questions about human evolution, the natural world, and the nature of transformation. His conclusion emphasizes how problems in social inequality and the inability for specialized knowledge (via science, as an example) to necessarily lead to human betterment are illumined by his world historical view on the human system. Unlike Manning’s world history of the human system back to the beginning of recorded history, Manjapra focuses squarely on modern colonialism in global perspective. For Manjapra this means both the identification of a “new colonialism” from the rise of capitalist empires from the 1400s onward and the concomitant tool of “racial capitalism” accompanying this sort of colonialism, dependent on commodification, extraction, and appropriation on increasingly larger scales from the 1400s onward. This leads Manjapra to introduce “the new colonialism” as “colonial force arising through the history of racial capitalism, [which] was more violent and invasive than any other form of colonialism that the world had previously known.”94 In addition to grasping this form of colonialism on a global scale, Manjapra also offers a methodological innovation, given the uneven and at times complete lack of extant sources, in order to advance a “different way of knowing that is appropriate to the task.”95 This method is termed parallax, or “the multiplied perspective,” which enables a viewer to appreciate various histories within one particular object or source that is often hidden from view.96 Manjapra deploys “parallactic” readings in a number of ways that correspond to the chapters of the book. The first four chapters focus on historical sites of engagement such as war, settlement, plantation, and port. The last five chapters focus on forms of knowledge and institutions of knowledge reproduction, such as science, school, debt, space, and body. Crucial for Manjapra is a centering of violence, yielding potentially productive reading alongside Robbins’ 2018 query. Though both Manning and Manjapra diverge in time span and method, both affirm and advance the world history genre of historical research and writing as well as offer it as an intervention into present day politics, claiming its importance for any meaningful assessment of the contemporary world. Given the range of specializations available in both disciplines, global historians and literary critics interested in world literature may not easily come together in the twenty-first century in a shared endeavor. What are these paradigms useful

introduction 43

for? Conrad ends his 2016 What is Global History ends with a mention of the «utopian promise of global history to turn us into citizens of the world»97 and claims that “global history is an inherently cosmopolitan endeavor.”98 In world literature studies, many from Pheng Cheah to Alex Beecroft find humanist value in the enterprise of world literature, thereby linking back to one of the original motives behind the paradigm itself. Similarly, one branch of world history claimed to counter parochial nationalisms and particularisms through historical research.99 Keeping in mind critiques of the world-literature criticism as well as the limits of world history, the changing landscape of social, political, and ecological crises and conflicts may compel a revival of thinking across the frontiers of world historical research and world literary theory. One result is that historians who conceptualize world historical subjects have begun to do so with large scale narratives in mind. Sujit Sivasundaram’s Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire tells the story of the era of modern revolutions from the 1770s to the 1830s through a series of stories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Centering various individuals and cultures rarely seen in the context of modern revolutions, such as Australian aboriginal Cora Gooseberry or Burmese monk Maung Nu, Sivasundaram casts such individuals as makers of world history and institutions like the East India Company as “world-spanning.” Sivasundaram’s latest work joins other recent interventions like Coll Thrush’s Indigenous London, which poses indigenous peoples as world-makers in the making of the modern world. Thrush also detours into literary devices, as he includes interludes of creative literary writing in between chapters that link to existing discussions in global history, such as revolution, migration, cartography, and science.100 These last two works by Sivasundaram and Thrush point to Amitav Ghosh’s conclusion in The Great Derangement, that history and literature may have to revise their models in order to make sense of the issues animating present day discussions. These include crises of environmental degradation, that he claims historians and literary critics haven’t explored. Instead of histories of the world, or global histories of a particular process, planetary histories now appear as a subfield of historical work for the globally minded historian. In the domain of world history, the notion of a global history has been surpassed by a planetary history, as suggested by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his Climate of History.101 Chakrabarty argues that global histories, drawing on histories written in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,102 were focused on humans, human agency, and the notion of one singular humanity. Given the rise of global warming, climate change, and the inability to view humans as the sole agent of histories (with the concomitant rise of deep histories), the planetary frame emerges as one that may replace the global. The planetary focuses on geological time scales and places humans into a framework that is neither centered on nor periodized by human activity.

44 neilesh bose

In our current age in which one crisis after another threatens intelligibility of the past, empirically grounded histories of past worlds and the crafting of useful stories about those worlds, are needed more than ever. Such histories may be called global, world, planetary, or may refuse these labels in the name of locality and particularity. Nonetheless, the developments in theorizing frameworks for historical research and writing and developing models for literary criticism likely will come back in conversation, just as models of natural history and human history, with the rise of deep history and planetary history, seem to be back together again. This volume aims to begin conversation around what such potential models may look like.

Notes 1

See D. Moses, “Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History,” History and Theory 44, 3 (October 2005): 311–322; White’s response in “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses,” History and Theory 44, 3 (October 2005): 333–338; and Moses’ rejoinder in “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Rejoinder to Hayden White,” History and Theory 44, 3 (October 2005): 339–347.

2

M. Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization (New York: Penguin, 2017); M. Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017). A. Ghosh’s three novels include Sea of Poppies (New York: Picador, 2008); River of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011); and Flood of Fire (New York: Penguin, 2015).

3

Though these works have risen to prominence, particular members of the historical profession abandoned any aspiration to things global. See the aggressive critique of A. Mikhail’s God’s Shadow: The Ottoman sultan who shaped the modern world (New York: Norton, 2020) by C. Fleischer, C. Kafadar, and S.Subrahmanyam, titled “How to Write Fake Global History,” Cromohs – Cyber Review of Modern Historiography (10 September 2020), https://doi.org/10.13128/cromohs-12032, accessed 11 April 2021. The trio argues that the appearance of Mikhail’s book—written for a popular audience—shows global history to be “an excuse for authors to make outlandish claims, based on the belief that they will not be subject to the usual scholarly scrutiny.” Other historians critical of the rise of global or globally themed histories feature J. Adelman, known in this capacity for his article “What is global history now?” Aeon, 2 March 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/is-global-historystill-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment, accessed 11 April 2021.

4

J. P. Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (New York: Di Capo Press, 1998), 132.

5

K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore, revised by Friedrich Engels, in M. Puchner, ed., The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005), 10. The entire passage is reproduced in Jonathan Arac’s contribution to this volume.

6

B. V. Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 26.

introduction 45

7

P. Casanova, La Republique mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999); F. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan–Feb 2000): 54–68; and F. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (New York: Verso, 2007).

8

D. Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1.

9

See A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 10 volumes (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961); H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1930).

10

B. Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, 3

11

Three important synthetic overviews of world history in the twenty-first century include C. A. Bayly,

(1998): 385–395. The Birth of the Modern World, 1789-1914 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); and C. A. Bayly, Remaking the Modern World, 1900-2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018). A recent edited volume introducing the most recent debates as well as research directions is Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World, edited by D. Sachsenmeier and S. Beckert (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). The 2015 Cambridge World History offers a seven-volume history of the world in nine books, edited by Merry Wiesner-Hanks. A collection of useful essays regarding the field of world history is found in D. Northrup (ed.), A Companion to World History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012). Recent debates about global history as a field are collected in the online journal CROMOHS, https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/current-debates. 12

Edited collections such as The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by T. D’haen, D. Damrosch and D. Kadir (New York: Routledge, 2012) and Debating World Literature, edited by C. Prendergast (New York: Verso, 2004) contain essential reflections on approaches to the subject. A range of works in the wake of various critical engagements with the world literary paradigm have emerged in the last two decades. Examples from different locales include W. C. Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); T. Migraine-George, From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013); and J. Nickels, World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

13

See T D’haen, “World Literature and World History,” Comparative Literature and World Literature 1, 2 (2016): 14–24.

14

https://www.shahziasikander.com/artworks/parallax.

15

D. Damrosch, “World Literature’s World History,” in M. Hawas (ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3.

16

Wells, Outline of History, iv, cited in Damrosch, “World Literature’s World History,” 8.

17

Damrosch, “World Literature’s World History,” 11.

18

Ibid.

19

See P. Manning, “Moving Institutions: World history and its beginnings in theory,” in M. Hawas (ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (New York: Routledge, 2018), 21–24.

20

For a concise case placing global history as historical sociology, see P. Crossley, “Why do expectations persist that global history should be history?” Cromohs – Cyber Review of Modern Historiography (1 March 2021), https://doi.org/10.36253/cromohs-12614, accessed 11 April 2021.

21

B. Robbins, “What World History does World Literature Need?” in M. Hawas (ed.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (New York: Routledge, 2018), 197.

46 neilesh bose

22

S. Subrahmanyam, “On the Origins of Global History,” Lecture delivered 28 November 2013, https:// books.openedition.org/cdf/4200?lang=en, accessed 11 April 2021.

23

Ibid.

24

S. Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined histories: Crónica and Tārīkh in the sixteenth-century Indian Ocean world,” History and Theory 49, 4 (2010): 118–145; S. Subrahmanyam, “Historicizing the Global or Labouring for Invention,” History Workshop Journal 64 (Autumn 2007): 329–334; S. Subrahmanyam, “On world historians in the sixteenth century,” Representations 91, 1 (2005): 26–57; S. Subrahmanyam and G. Balachandran, “On the History of Globalization and India: Concepts, Measures, Debates,” in J. Assayag and C. Fuller (eds.), Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below (London: Anthem Press, 2005), 17–46.

25

P. Crossley, What is Global History? (London: Polity, 2008); and S. Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

26

A. Stoler, C. McGranahan and P. Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007).

27

F. Cooper and J. Burbank. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

28

K. Barkey, Empires of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

29

M. Thomas and R. Toye, Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

30

J. R. Fichter, British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East: Connected Empires

31

A. W. M. Smith and C. Jeppesen, eds., Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future

across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Imperfect? (London: UCL Press, 2017). 32

R. Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1963); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1948), K. Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1966); S. Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992); J. Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); U. Patnaik and P. Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); and J. C. Sharman, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

33

H. Harder, “An Alternative World History from India? Ramavatar Sharma’s Puzzling Hindi Narration of Mudgarānandˡcaritāvalī of 1912-13” Working Papers in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures 3, accessed 11 April 2021. Prabhat Kumar’s incisive analysis of this extraordinary text argues that it offered a sophisticated approach toward not defending a particular tradition but casting modernity as universal, seeing the diversity in the world and in the “West” as well as critiquing aspects of pre-existing knowledge traditions. See P. Kumar, “Satire, Modernity, Transculturality in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century North India,” Ph.D. diss., SüdasienInstitut der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2015.

34

Julia Adeney Thomas offers a view of world history from the vibrant history of Japan that don’t merely replicate or critique the line from Spengler to McNeill and Bentley in the twenty-first century. See J. A. Thomas, “High Anxiety: World History as Japanese Self-Discovery,” in B. Stucktey and E. Fuchs (eds.), Writing World History: 1800-2000 (London: German Historical Institute London and Oxford University Press, 2003), 309–326.

35

See A. Stanley, “On global history, ‘trade book history,’ and why we care,” blog post, 25  September  2020, https://www.amy-stanley.com/blog-1/on-global-history-trade-book-history-and-why-we-care,

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accessed 11 April 2021. P. Crossley, “Why Women Have No Home in Global History,” 9/13/2020, https://www.dartmouth.edu/~crossley/comments_7.html, accessed 25 September 2020 (site discon� tinued). 36

See L. Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review, 121, (April 2016): 377–402, and S. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals (New York: Norton, 2019) as two significant examples. See A. Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020).

37

R. Drayton and R. Motadel, “Discussion: The Futures of Global History,” Journal of Global History 13, 1 (2018): 1–21.

38

See B. Venkat Mani’s history of world literature as a concept in Recoding World Literature, 21–26.

39

D. Menon, “A Local Cosmopolitan: ‘Kesari’ Balakrishna Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala,” in S. Bose and K. Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 131–158.

40

Ibid, 131.

41

Ibid, 137.

42

Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 8. This position draws directly from the work of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.

43

Other works written in this broad orientation include P. Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); D. Ganguly, This Thing Called a World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and E. Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). In each case, the world is a modern one.

44

Menon, “A Local Cosmopolitan,” 153.

45

See A. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, 3 (Spring 2010): 458–493 as well as A. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

46

W. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). An insightful review identifying the polemics in Hallaq is found in Azfar Moin, https:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53061, December 2019.

47

E. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatabilty (New York: Verso, 2013); and R. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

48

A. Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Verso, 2015), 27.

49

Mani, Recoding World Literature.

50

Ibid, 44.

51

Ibid, 47.

52

S. Pollock, The Languages of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 565.

53

Pollock, The Languages of the Gods, 16.

54

Pollock, The Languages of the Gods, 17.

55

Pollock, The Languages of the Gods, 17.

56

Pollock, The Languages of the Gods, Section 14.2, 539–565.

57

Pollock, The Languages of the Gods, 539.

58

F. Orsini, “The Multilingual Local in World Literature,” Comparative Literature 67, 4 (2015): 346.

48 neilesh bose

59

The MULSIGOE, Multi-Lingual Locals and Significant Geographies which proposes a set of multi-lingual sites for literary critical research, decentering the need for a world approach. See https:// www.soas.ac.uk/cclps/research/multilingual-locals-and-significant-geographies/. See K. Laachir, S. Marzagova and F. Orsini, “Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: For a Ground-up and Located Approach to World Literature,” Modern Languages Open 1 (2018), http://doi.org/10.3828/ mlo.v0i0.190.

60

B. Bhattacharya, Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (New York: Routledge, 2018); and A. Majumdar, Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

61

Bhattacharya, Postcolonial writing, 9.

62

Majumdar, Insurgent Imaginations, 200.

63

A. Ramachandran, Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 13.

64

Ibid, 14.

65

N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 7–16.

66

D. Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in S. Moyn and A. Sartori (eds.), Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 257.

67

A. Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 23.

68

E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994). This followed a trilogy of other books on modern “ages,” about revolution (1789-1848), capital (1848-1875) and empire (1875-1914).

69

Y. Di Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); A. Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018); and Q. Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

70

This is also the title of a recent work in world history, World Histories from Below, eds. A. Burton and T. Ballantyne (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

71

S. Subrahmanyam, “On the Origins of Global History,” 23.

72

A. Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

73

J. A. Thomas, P. Parthasarathi, R. Linrothe, Fa-Ti Fan, K. Pomeranz and A. Ghosh, “JAS Roundtable on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, 4 (November 2016): 938.

74

This is one of the points made forcefully by R. Wenzlhuemer in Doing Global History: An Introduction in 6 Concepts (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

75

See M. Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

76

See also E. Darian-Smith and P. C. McCarty, The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), as well as H. Kahn, ed., Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), as touchstones in the field of global studies.

77

Sachsenmeier and Beckert, Global History, Globally, 461.

78

P. James and M. Steger, “A Genealogy of Globalization: The Career of a Concept,” Globalizations 11,

79

Ibid, 427.

80

Ibid, 419.

4 (2014): 425.

introduction 49

81

On a related but separate note, B. R. Tomlinson argues that the term “Third World” subsided in favor of “globalization” to the detriment of fully exploring the local and particular colonial and post-colonial histories of regions in Asia and Africa, See B. R. Tomlinson, “What was the Third World?” Journal of Contemporary History 38, 2 (2003): 307–321.

82

Dilip Menon, “Walking on Water: Globalization and History,” Global Perspectives 1, 1 (2020): 1. https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2020.12176, accessed 11 April 2021.

83

Ibid, 5.

84

K. M. Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1945) and P. Beaujard, Les Mondes de l’Ocean Indien (2 volumes) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

85

N. Worden, “Writing the Global Indian Ocean,” Journal of Global History 12, 1 (March 2017): 145–154.

86

See the Routledge series on the Indian Ocean and Trans-Asia, https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Series-on-the-Indian-Ocean-and-Trans-Asia/book-series/RSIO. About research centers, see the McGill University center, https://indianoceanworldcentre.com/ and its journal, the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies, established in 2017. The Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies has published 22 books as of 2021, https://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14661?page=2. On spices, see M. Pearson, ed., Spices in the Indian Ocean World (Aldershot, VT: Varorium, 1996). On Islam, see O. H. Ali, ed., Islam in the Indian Ocean World: A History with Documents (New York: Bedfords/St. Martin’s, 2016); S. Bose and A. Jalal, eds., Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); and W. C. Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019). Islamic law in the Indian Ocean is explored in M. Kooria and S. Ravensbergen, eds., Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas, and Practices (New York: Routledge, 2021).

87

N. Green, “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123, 3 (June 2018): 846–74.

88

This is the subtitle of Sheriff’s chapter in A. Sheriff and E. Ho, eds., The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creations of New Societies (London: Hurst, 2014), 11–41.

89

Recent overviews include M. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003) and E. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), as well as Sheriff and Ho, eds., The Indian Ocean. These follow Panikkar, India and the Indian Ocean, as well as seminal contributions such as K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and K. McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). Such works form the backdrop of recent contributions such as S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); N. Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), and P. Gupta, I. Hofmeyr, and M. Pearson, eds., Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010), all of which offer contemporary perspectives on the Indian Ocean from diverse vantage points in the twenty-first century.

90

S. Srinivas, N. Jeychandran, and B. Ng’weno, eds., Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2020).

91

See K. Kulkarni, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India, 1790-1890 (London: Bloomsbury, 2022) for a book-length exploration of this topic.

92

M. Mizamura, An I-Novel, trans. Juliet Winters Carpers in collaboration with the author (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

50 neilesh bose

93

P. Manning, A History of Humanity: The History of a Human System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) and K. Manjapra, Colonialism in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

94

Manjapra, Colonialism in Global Perspective, 8.

95

Ibid, 6.

96

Shahzia Sikander’s 2013 installation Parallax is explored in a contribution to the Routledge Companion, 2018.

97

Conrad, What is Global History, 207.

98

Ibid. 206.

99

As Damrosch states based on his readings of Wells and related historians, “what we need are histories that are open enough to allow the variety of our materials to challenge and modify the aesthetic, political, and historiographic frameworks we bring to them,” in “World Literature’s World History,” 11.

100

S. Sivasundaram, Waves across the South: A new history of revolution and empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) and C. Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

101

D. Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

102

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; M. Geyer and C. Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100, 4 (October 1995): 1034–1060.

Works Cited Adelman, Jeremy. “What is global history now?” Aeon 2 March 2017. https://aeon.co/essays/is-globalhistory-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment, accessed 11 April 2021. Ali, Omar H., ed. Islam in the Indian Ocean World: A History with Documents. New York: Bedfords/St. Martin’s, 2016. Alpers, Edward. The Indian Ocean in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Amin, Samir. Empire of Chaos. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatabilty. New York: Verso, 2013. Barkey, Karen. Empires of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. ______. Remaking the Modern World, 1900-2015: Global Connections and Comparisons. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018. Bell, Duncan. “Making and Taking Worlds.” In Global Intellectual History, edited by Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, 254–282. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Beaujard, Philippe. Les Mondes de l’Ocean Indien. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Beecroft, Alex. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. New York: Verso, 2015. Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations. New York: Routledge, 2018. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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———, and Ayesha Jalal, eds. Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Burton, Antoinette and Tony Ballantyne, eds. World Histories from Below. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Casanova, Pascale. La Republique mondiale des lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Conrad, Sebastian. What is Global History? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Cooper, Frederick and Jane Burbank. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Crossley, Pamela. What is Global History? London: Polity, 2008. ———. “Why Women Have No Home in Global History,” 13 September 2020, https://www.dartmouth. edu/~crossley/comments_7.html, accessed 25 September 2020 (site discontinued). ———. “Why do expectations persist that global history should be history?” Cromohs – Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 1 March 2021. https://doi.org/10.36253/cromohs-12614, accessed 11 April 2021. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. “World Literature’s World History.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas, 3–13. New York: Routledge, 2018. Darian-Smith, Eve and Philip C. McCarty. The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017. D’haen, Theo, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, eds. The Routledge Companion to World Literature. New York: Routledge, 2012. ———. “World Literature and World History.” Comparative Literature and World Literature 1 no. 2 (2016): 14–24. Di Capua, Yoav. No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Drayton, Richard and Roy Motadel. “Discussion: The Futures of Global History.” Journal of Global History 13, 1 (2018): 1–21. Eckermann, Johann Peter. Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann. Translated by John Oxenford. New York: Di Capo Press, 1998. Fichter, James R. British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East: Connected Empires across the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Fleischer, Cornell, Cemal Kafadar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. “How to Write Fake Global History.” Cromohs – Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 10 September 2020. https://doi.org/10.13128/ cromohs-12032, accessed 11 April 2021. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called a World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Geyer, Michael and Charles Bright. “World History in a Global Age.” American Historical Review 100, 4 (October 1995): 1034–1060.

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Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. New York: Picador, 2008. ———. River of Smoke. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011. ———. Flood of Fire. New York: Penguin, 2015. ———. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Go, Julian. Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978. Green, Nile. “The Waves of Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean,” American Historical Review 123, 3 (June 2018): 846–74. Gupta, Pamila, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pearson, eds. Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010. Hallaq, Wael. Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Harder, Hans. “An Alternative World History from India? Ramavatar Sharma’s Puzzling Hindi Narration of Mudgarānandˡcaritāvalī of 1912-13.” Working Papers in Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures 3, accessed 11 April 2021. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. New York: Norton, 2019. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. New York: Vintage, 1994. Jacob, Wilson Chacko. For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. James, Paul and Manfred Steger, “A Genealogy of Globalization: The Career of a Concept.” Globalizations 11, 4 (2014): 417–434. Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017. Kahn, Hilary, ed. Framing the Global: Entry Points for Research. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014. Kooria, Mahmood and Sanne Ravensbergen, eds. Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas, and Practices. New York: Routledge, 2021. Kulkarni, Kedar. World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India, 1790-1890. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Kumar, Prabhat. “Satire, Modernity, Transculturality in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century North India.” Ph.D. diss., Südasien-Institut der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2015. Laachir, Karima, Sara Marzagova, and Francesca Orsini, “Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: For a Ground-up and Located Approach to World Literature.” Modern Languages Open 1 (2018): 19. http://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.190. Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1948. Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1963. Mani, B. Venkat. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Manjapra, Kris. Colonialism in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated by Samuel Moore, revised by Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings, edited by Martin Puchner. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005.

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McPherson, Kenneth. The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. Majumdar, Auritro. Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Manning, Patrick. “Moving Institutions: World history and its beginnings in theory.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas, 21–24. New York: Routledge, 2018. ———. A History of Humanity: The History of a Human System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Mazlish, Bruce. “Comparing Global History to World History.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, 3 (1998): 385–395. Menon, Dilip. “A Local Cosmopolitan: ‘Kesari’ Balakrishna Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala.” in Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas, edited by Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra, 131–158. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ———. “Walking on Water: Globalization and History.” Global Perspectives 1, 1 (2020): 1. https://doi. org/10.1525/gp.2020.12176, accessed 11 April 2021. Migraine-George, Therese. From Francophonie to World Literature in French: Ethics, Poetics, and Politics. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Mikhail, Alan. God’s Shadow: The Ottoman sultan who shaped the modern world.New York: Norton, 2020. Mizamura, Minae. An I-Novel. Translated by Juliet Winters Carpers in collaboration with the author. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Moin, A. Azfar. “Moin on Hallaq, ‘Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge’.” H-Asia, December 2019. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53061, accessed 29 March 2022. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (Jan–Feb 2000): 54–68. ———. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. New York: Verso, 2007. Moses, Dirk A. “Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History.” History and Theory 44, 3 (October 2005): 311–322. ______. “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Rejoinder to Hayden White.” History and Theory 44, 3 (October 2005): 339–347. Mufti, Aamir. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36, 3 (Spring 2010): 458–493. ______. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nickels, Joel. World Literature and the Geographies of Resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Nkrumah, Kwame. Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. New York: International Publishers, 1966. Northrup, Douglas, ed. A Companion to World History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012. Orsini, Francesca. “The Multilingual Local in World Literature.” Comparative Literature 67, 4 (2015): 346. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Panikkar, K. M. India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power on Indian History. London: Allen and Unwin, 1945. Patnaik, Usha and Prabhat Patnaik. A Theory of Imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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Pearson, Michael, ed. Spices in the Indian Ocean World. Aldershot, VT: Varorium, 1996. ———. The Indian Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pollock, Sheldon. The Languages of the Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. New York: Verso, 2004. Puchner, Martin. The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization. New York: Penguin, 2017. Putnam, Lara. “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast.” The American Historical Review, 121, 2 (April 2016): 377–402. Ramachandran, Ayesha. Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Robbins, Bruce. “What world history does world literature need?” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas, 194–206. New York: Routledge, 2018. Sachsenmeier, Dominic and Sven Beckert, eds. Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Sharman, J. C. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Sherrif, Abdul and Enseng Ho, eds. The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creations of New Societies. London: Hurst, 2014. Sivasundaram, Sujit. Waves across the South: A new history of revolution and empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Smith, Andrew W. M. and Chris Jeppesen, eds. Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? London: UCL Press, 2017. Srinivas, Smriti, Neelima Jeychandran, and Bettina Ng’weno, eds. Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds. New York: Routledge, 2020. Stanley, Amy.“On global history, ‘trade book history,’ and why we care.” Blog post, 25 September 2020. https://www.amy-stanley.com/blog-1/on-global-history-trade-book-history-and-why-we-care, accessed 11 April 2021. ______. Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020. Steger, Manfred. The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Stoler, Ann, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds. Imperial Formations. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “On world historians in the sixteenth century.” Representations 91, 1 (2005): 26–57. ———. “Historicizing the Global or Labouring for Invention.” History Workshop Journal 64 (Autumn 2007): 329–334. ———. “Intertwined histories: Crónica and Tārīkh in the sixteenth-century Indian Ocean world.” History and Theory 49, 4 (2010): 118–145. ———. “On the Origins of Global History.” Lecture delivered at the Collège de France, 28 November 2013. https://books.openedition.org/cdf/4200?lang=en, accessed 11 April 2021. ———, and G. Balachandran, “On the History of Globalization and India: Concepts, Measures, Debates,” in Globalizing India: Perspectives from Below, edited by Jackie Assayag and Chris Fuller, 17–46. London: Anthem Press, 2005.

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Thomas, Julia Adeney. “High Anxiety: World History as Japanese Self-Discovery.” In Writing World History: 1800-2000, edited by Benedikt Stucktey and Eckhardt Fuchs, 309–326. London: German Historical Institute London and Oxford University Press, 2003. ———, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Rob Linrothe, Fa-Ti Fan, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Amitav Ghosh. “JAS Roundtable on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.” Journal of Asian Studies 75, 4 (November 2016): 929–955. Thomas, Martin and Richard Toye. Arguing about Empire: Imperial Rhetoric in Britain and France, 1882-1956. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Thrush, Coll. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Tomlinson, B. R. “What was the Third World?” Journal of Contemporary History 38, 2 (2003): 307–321. Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. New York: Viking, 2018. Toynbee, Arnold J. A Study of History, 10 volumes. London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961. Um, Nancy. The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Wells, H. G. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1930. Wenzlhuemer, Roland. Doing Global History: An Introduction in 6 Concepts. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. White, Hayden. “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to Dirk Moses.” History and Theory 44, 3 (October 2005): 333–338. Worden, Nigel. “Writing the Global Indian Ocean.” Journal of Global History 12, 1 (March 2017): 145–154.

CHAPTER 2

Can we have a global literary history? Alexander Beecroft

Abstract Numerous challenges exist to the writing of a truly global literary history. Existing literary histories are closely tied to the notion of the national literature, and their structures and periodizations do not lend themselves readily to worlding. At the same time, the theories and methods of world history and world literature, with their emphases on networks and flows, present problems for a historical narrative which must focus to at least some degree on major texts and authors. Most urgently, a global literary history needs to identify geographies and chronologies to give itself structure. A chronological structure is proposed, built around key historical nodes at which large-scale political transitions led to changes in literary language, theme, and style across much of Eurasia, if not Afro-Eurasia. Regionalization is proposed along lines that reflect the densest patterns of literary circulation within a given chronological period.

Keywords: world literature; literary history; periodization; literary geography; Eurochronology

There is a certain antipathy between world literature and literary history. Both trace their origins to, or through, the early nineteenth century and the era of nationalism, each in a different way a response to that stimulus. But theories and models of World Literature have had a striking tendency to be transhistorical, or even ahistorical, in their approach, to breach chronological barriers even more readily than they have broken through geographic ones. Why is that? And does it have to be thus? My goal in this paper is to suggest that this tension can be resolved in some way, that there is some way to write a literary history of the world—or, better, multiple ways to write multiple literary histories of the world. This goal is thoroughly self-interested: I am myself in the midst of writing a book entitled A Global History of Literature, and while I suppose completing the project will constitute proof of its possibility, I have a self-evident interest in confirming the theoretical possibility, even desirability, of completing the task. In what follows, I begin with a brief discussion of the history of literary history itself, followed by a review of selected theories of world literature from the perspective of how they negotiate the historical. I then consider several extra-disciplinary possibilities, before outlining the approach I am attempting to take myself.

58 alexander beecroft

A History of Literary History Both René Wellek and Claudio Guillén find the origins of literary history in the Italy of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in works such as Gian Mario Crescimbeni’s Istoria della vulgar poesia (1698), Giacinto Gimma’s Idea della storia dell’Italia letterata (1723), and Marco Foscarini’s Storia della letteratura veneziana (1752). These works differ substantively from the practice of literary history as it will later emerge, in that they are focused on rather narrower topics: poetry, for example, rather than literature as a whole; or the literature of the Venetian Republic rather than that of the Italian language (still less, of course, of the Italian nation-state, still more than a century in the future). It is in the early nineteenth century that the discipline of literary history emerged in a more recognizable form; Wellek identifies in particular the Geschichte der neuern Poesie und Beredsamkeit (1801–19) of Friedrich Bouterwek, Friedrich Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1815), Abel François Villemain’s Tableau de la littérature au moyen âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre (1830), Jean-Charles-Léonard Sismondi’s De la littérature du Midi de l’Europe (1813), and Paolo Emiliani Giudici’s Storia delle belle lettere in Italia (1845) as significant early works in the field. René Wellek claims that the earliest works of literary history were specifically national in character, motivated above all by patriotism. While it is certainly not difficult to find moments of intense national pride in each of these works, even a quick glance at their titles reveals another important fact: at a minimum, each of these works deals with multiple modern European literatures, from some sort of comparative perspective. Sismondi includes literatures in Portuguese, Spanish, Provencal, and Italian, while Bouterwek’s twelve volumes covers the Nationalliteraturen (a term for which Bouterwek is an early source) in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and German, and Schlegel promises his reader “ein Bild im Ganzen von der Entwicklung und dem Geiste der Literatur bei den vornehmsten Nationem des Alterthums und der neueren Zeit.” (“an overall picture of the development and spirit of literature in the principal nations of antiquity and modern times”). Far from simply recounting the glories of the national patrimony, then, these literary histories construct European literary space as a series of national literatures, each possessing a parallel history of development from the middle ages to the present. These parallel histories, I have argued elsewhere, tend to be teleological in nature. Beginning with so-called “shibboleth texts” such as Beowulf or the Chanson de Roland, ostensibly the oral and popular works of rough and innocent pre-Christian cultures, these European literary histories proceed through medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and so on to the present Romantic era, moving from the naïve to the sentimental, from raw to refined. In each case it is only literature in a standardized version of the national language that counts: regional or dialectal

can we have a global literary history? 59

texts are marginalized, as are texts in Latin, or those in other European national languages. While much scholarship of the past thirty or forty years in particular has been devoted to complicating these progressive liberal narratives of literary history, the unthought assumptions of these narratives remain influential, and tend to shape public understanding and school curricula, among other things. Further, while there has been a great deal of work in many national-literary traditions on recuperating works in the standard language by women and by other writers considered peripheral to elite culture (whether written by ethnic minorities or by marginal social groups), there has been much less emphasis on works in non-standard languages, and still less on works written on national territory, but in cosmopolitan languages such as Latin (in the European case) or Persian (in the case of South and West Asia). Tellingly, Schlegel goes so far as to add Greece and Rome to the list of “nations” whose literary history he will relate, subsuming even the classical past under the national-literature ecology1. Even more intriguingly, Schlegel’s work includes a lecture on Indian literature, as well as a discussion of Arabic and Persian literature in his discussion of medieval poetry. These non-European literatures enter into Schlegel’s history, but only at carefully-defined moments, as supplements. Indian (i.e. Sanskrit) literature enters as an Indo-European complement to the Greco-Roman classics, while Arabic and Persian literature enters as an influence and analogue for medieval European lyric. Other periods of Indian or Near Eastern literature do not enter the discussion, especially not those nearer Schlegel’s own time. In a comparative vein, one might note the similarity to the configuration of the world offered in, for example, Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art (Phaidon, 1950). In Gombrich’s famous work, chapters 1, 2, 5, and 7 (out of 27, later 28, chapters in all) deal in whole or in part with non-European art, reaching as far as China, but coming no closer to the present than the thirteenth century outside of Europe. Gombrich then quickly surveys European art from the sixth through twelfth centuries in two short chapters, before devoting chapters 10-28 to a careful survey of European art from the thirteenth century to his own time. Like many of his era, Gombrich alludes to an alleged static quality in non-European art as his justification for abandoning its discussion here: “But there is one respect in which Western Europe always differed profoundly from the East. IN the East [these] styles lasted for thousands of years, and there seemed no reason why they should ever change. The West never knew this immobility. It was always restless, groping for new solutions and new ideas”2.

Where European art moved from triumph to triumph in Gombrich’s narrative, representing with ever-greater skill the aesthetic vision of its era, non-Western art remained allegedly static and sterile, continuing to reflect ancient conventions and

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styles. Of course, the notion that non-European cultures remained static in political and economic terms was familiar, too, at least from the time of Marx and the “Asiatic mode of production.” In the case of art history, this claim for unchanging styles can reflect only either ignorance or inattention, as the art of regions such as China, Japan, South Asia, and the Arab world certainly underwent considerable stylistic shifts over the period 1200-2000, pace Gombrich. This is one way, of course, to create a global literary history: to use European literary history as the armature onto which relevant pieces of non-European literature can be molded as needed to flesh out the story. By denying the possibility of change to non-Western cultures, it becomes possible to create a uniform narrative for global artistic (or literary) history, a Eurocentric narrative which by its own definitions therefore captures all significant historical change, and which can be supplemented by occasional glances at the static traditions of other regions. To tell a story in which the non-West changes as much as the West, but not necessarily in the same ways at the same times, is of course much more challenging. At any rate, such was the model of literary history developed in Western Europe during the early nineteenth century, in the Romantic and nationalist era following in the wake of Napoleon. Literary history was to be organized along national principles, ignoring for the most part anything which did not fit a progressive narrative of national history. The story was the story of the emergence of a vernacular literary tradition out of the ashes of the classical world; texts in non-standard languages, including Latin, would not be part of the story. As colonialism spread the European concept of nationalism across the planet, similar models of literary history took root elsewhere. Outside Europe, the narrative of progressive vernacularization intersected with Orientalist narratives, popular locally as well as in Europe, by which the great literary cultures of the ancient past had stagnated and failed to make the innovations which would lead, in Europe, to modernity. Arabic never fully vernacularized, though it has used various more-or-less vernacular registers for a number of poetic forms for centuries. As a result, the literary histories of Arabic which emerged both in Arabic lands and in Europe in the nineteenth century saw the period from the pre-Islamic era to the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 as the age of excellence, followed by an Age of Decadence which extended until the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt, and al-Nahda, or the Awakening—the era in which Western influence became important. The progressive narrative of European literary history clearly operates as a framework on which this Arabic literary history was developed. Arabic attained a canonical literary style much earlier than any vernacular European literature, and then retained that style much longer (neither in and of themselves, of course, necessarily a bad thing). Accordingly, the imposition of the European literary-historical narrative transforms that long history of classicism into a period of stagnation missing its vernacular and modernizing

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revolution, which takes place late and in a revised form in the nineteenth century. Even very recent histories of Arabic literature continue to conform to this narrative (even sometimes while attempting to complicate the narrative; see3; efforts to rewrite that history completely are just beginning; see e.g.4). Similarly in China, where vernacular registers were more widely used in earlier times, but where the process of vernacularization did not take place officially until the May Fourth era (i.e. beginning in 1920). May Fourth-era reformists such as Hu Shi constructed for the first time a literary history of the Chinese tradition. Previous centuries had certainly enjoyed a developed sense of the evolution of the poetic tradition over time, with major poets of each age frequently aligning themselves with great poets or eras of the past. We can see this phenomenon developing at least as early as the so-called Jiangxi school of poets surrounding Huang Tingjian (1045-1105), who elevated High Tang poets such as Du Fu (712-770) as part of the legitimizing of their own aesthetic, but this kind of cyclical poetic taste, where innovations are characterized as belonging within a continuum of available historically-contingent styles, is arguably quite different from a literary history per se. Literary history as a scholarly discipline seeks to construct a narrative out of the existing corpus of material (ignoring certain kinds of texts as necessary to ensure the coherence of that narrative), rather than constructing one’s own lineage as a poet. I would also emphasize here that to derive one’s aesthetic style from a select group of forbearers, as many generations of Chinese poets would do, is as much a means of concealing radical innovation under the guise of a return to classical forms; as it is itself a return to classical forms, and we should not naively read such claims as proof of the sort of stylistic stagnation that Gombrich, for example, claimed to find outside Europe. One part of this May Fourth-era construction of literary history was the canonization of particular genres for each dynasty (Han fu, Tang shi, Song ci, Yuan drama, Ming and Qing fiction), a process which made the tradition more manageable by eliminating most of its texts as, again, “decadent,” and unworthy of serious study5. More importantly, the narrative imposed by Hu Shi (and found in early Republican literary histories) defined the main thrust of Chinese literary history in deliberately Westernizing terms as the emergence of the vernacular. Where Arabic literary history might leave the vernacular stillborn in a six-hundred-year Age of Decadence, Chinese literary history saw the vernacular as reaching its apogee under the Mongols, only to retreat into a kind of stagnation under the ethnically-Han Chinese Ming dynasty (1368-1644), where classical forms were renewed and vernacular innovations downplayed. In both cases, of course, western modernity turns out to be the answer. South Asia follows a broadly similar pattern in terms of underplaying the literary history of the final centuries before British rule (the more so because so

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much work in this period was in the colonizing cosmopolitan language of Persian), although the greater prevalence of the vernacular in South Asia complicates the picture somewhat.6 Japan provides a stronger exception to the pattern, with its thousand years of active vernacular literature prior to the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the consequent adoption of western models. The Japanese could (and did) therefore more easily appropriate the European literary-historical model of progressive vernacularization, while at the same time continuing to value their access to their own classical tradition, now re-imagined as an object of academic study and national pride.7 In general, however, non-European languages adopted the European model principally to demonstrate their own inadequacy vis-à-vis European literature, and to construct literary history polemically, as a demand for more vernacularism, somewhat paradoxically perceived as a necessary vehicle for further Europeanization. Even literary and cultural conservatives, ironically, often appropriated this same model in a different way, valorizing instead the ancient traditions of the distant past and looking to them instead of to a modern vernacularism, as the wellspring of social and cultural resilience in the face of European hegemony.8 This is one of the reasons why a literary history of the world cannot simply be written as an expanded version of the sorts of literary histories of Europe we saw beginning in the nineteenth century, with each national literature having its own parallel narrative. To think in terms of an assemblage of national narratives of progressive vernacularization distorts badly enough the histories of individual European literatures, or of European literature as a whole. But to attempt to bring this same scheme to the broader world brings greater distortions still. If a world literary history simply puts side-by-side all of the national literary histories of the world, without critically examining them, it is almost certain to reproduce the Eurochronological Eurocentrism of the narrative of progressive vernacularization I have discussed.9 Global literary history must not only be more than the sum of its parts, but must also find a way to transcend the parts which currently exist. It must be sensitive to the structural gaps and omissions in existing literary histories in order not to magnify them.

Existing models of world literature The transhistorical, or even ahistorical, nature of many existing theories of world literature render them problematic as models for global literary history. Even Goethe and Eckermann’s famous conversation, in which the phrase Weltliteratur is so famously deployed, displays early signs of world literature’s ahistorical tendencies. Goethe’s discussion of Weltliteratur emerges in part from his discussion

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of a Chinese novel (probably Jean-Pierre Remusat’s French translation of the novel Yu Jiao Li by Zhang Yun, likely published during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor, 1661-1722). He compares this novel with those of Samuel Richardson, as well as with his own Hermann and Dorothea, while also discussing the Chansons of PierreJean de Béranger (1780-1857). In the discussion, he also alludes to the traditional cycle of Serbian poems around the fourteenth-century Battle of Kosovo, Calderón, the Niebelungenlied, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and so on. This eclectic discussion deliberately removes texts from their historical context, and purposefully so: in annihilating geographic borders, Goethe’s Weltliteratur also fractures chronological borders, as well as the borders between elite, popular, and folk literature. Goethe’s Weltliteratur is interested in these texts for what they offer him as a reader and as an author, not in what they might have meant to their original audiences (or, as with his Chinese novel, perceived similarities in texts are used to construct presumed similarities in audiences). This instrumentalization of texts from other places and times, deploying them as a mirror to the self rather than of their own times, will be a recurrent theme in the study of world literature. Of recent theories of world literature, Pascale Casanova’s does indeed trace a kind of history of the République mondiale des lettres, beginning with du Bellay in the fifteenth century, through a Herderian period into the brave new world of post-1945, where even Asia and Africa can begin to enter the World Republic of Letters.10 Literary capitals rise and fall, and the center of gravity moves from Italy to France, ultimately to London and New York. But her republic of letters excludes a lot of what often gets called literature: from European literature before du Bellay, beginning with Homer and Virgil, and running through Dante and Petrarch—a vast repertory of texts undeniably treated as “literary” by Casanova’s post-du Bellay Republic—and additionally excludes, as we’ve noted, all pre-1945 African and Asian literature. Kept out of the Republic, these texts are necessarily absent from its history, precisely because whatever history we could write of them, it would not be the narrative of progressive emancipation from the national that defines the World Republic of Letters for Casanova. So Casanova’s model does not allow us to sketch the literary history of the world, but rather a literary history of a world. We would need more than this to tell the whole story, even of European literature as conventionally defined. Franco Moretti’s discussions of world literature likewise can give us only fragments of a global literary history. His account, for example, of the diffusion of the Anglo-French novel on a formal level is a sort of history of the novel, or a sketch of one,11 though this kind of diffusionist approach necessarily treats diffusions synchronously, or typologically. Accordingly, the emergence of the Italian or US novel in the early nineteenth century, the Russian or Latin American later in that century, or the modern Chinese or African novel in the early twentieth century,

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all get treated as essentially simultaneous in their role as second-generation diffusions. This approach can offer revealing structural insights, of course, but what it cannot do is to relate the emergence of the Anglo-French novel around the world to the very specific and distinctive political (or, for that matter, literary) contexts for that emergence. Nor can this model readily account for cross-fertilization, so that (for example) the Russian novel, itself derived in part from Anglo-French precedents, nonetheless exerts an influence on the emergence of the novel in China and elsewhere. Moreover, while some parts of literary history can be told effectively in terms of diffusion, others cannot be described completely in those terms. The No drama and prose fiction of Japan, for example, are only in the loosest possible way the result of intellectual diffusion from elsewhere, and a historical account framed in diffusionist terms would miss much of the interest in these works. David Damrosch’s model, of world literature as those texts which gain in translation, and which have an elliptical relationship to both their own ethnographic past and to our world-literary present, has a relationship to history strikingly like Goethe’s in which texts are harvested from around the world to perform services for us as readers. While Damrosch’s ellipse cautions us not to lose sight of the original context of a work of literature, such an approach in practice risks encouraging more parochial readings, where texts are understood in terms of the universal values we find in them, universal values which all too often merely mirror our own expectations. Further, those texts which are not readily assimilable to our own tastes tend to get left behind, stuck forever in the amber of local history, denied access to the global. The notion of texts which have “gained in translation” also risks reifying the complex political processes (often Orientalizing) by which particular texts have already made it into translation. A text cannot gain in translation without first being translated, and so the model risks assuming that the somewhat arbitrary process by which texts are selected for translation has always already chosen the correct candidates for translation, rather than expecting that important works, fully capable of gaining in translation, may have so far failed to be translated. A history of world literature as Damrosch understands the concept might, if we were not careful, become a history of what matters to us. My own approach to world literature derives from my comparative study of the cultural politics of Archaic and Classical Greece on the one hand, and Spring and Autumn and Warring States era China on the other, as well as from the work of Sheldon Pollock on cosmopolitanism and vernacularism, and on others. I argue for world literature as the space within which we can undertake the comparative study of the interactions between literatures and their environments, which interactions I have taxonomized as epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, national, or global12. As I began to work on my own historical project, I imagined the possibility of writing a history organized according to these ecological typologies—and quickly realized

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that such a history was impossible. The value of such typological comparisons is precisely to reveal in a transhistorical way similarities between distinct cultural contexts, similarities which might make possible new understandings of each culture. History, by contrast, really does need to tell a story in a fixed order, from beginning to end. A comparative history of cosmopolitan literary systems, looking at the origins, development, and demise of literature in Sumerian, Akkadian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Classical Chinese would be a fascinating study, but it would juxtapose Sumerian texts of the twenty-fifth century BC with Persian texts of the seventeenth century AD, and therefore risk separating the story of that Persian literature, for example, in its interaction with local traditions in South Asia, in Ottoman Turkey, and elsewhere. Political and economic context is likewise prone to disappear from such a narrative, or to be generalized to the point of meaninglessness. Theory and history, in other words, are not the same thing. Other disciplinary approaches offer tempting possibilities. World history, for example, has been a fertile field for theoretical work for several decades, and arguably has reached a greater level of sophistication than has thinking about world literature. World history offers a number of possible methodologies. There’s the “connected history” of someone like Sanjay Subrahmanyam,13 which aims not to aggregate national histories, but rather to focus on movements, influences, flows, relations across boundaries, to pay closer attention to the processes to which national histories have been inattentive. There are also the “deep history” of David Lord Smail,14 and the “big history” of David Christian,15 which seek to reintegrate recorded history with the prehistoric world (in the case of “deep history”) or even with the origins of the universe (as with “big history”). All of these are interesting paradigms, and I think scholars of world literature should read in these areas, to think about how the nature of our questions might change as the scale of our object of study changes. But none of these approaches is entirely suitable for the study of world literature. “Connected history” can focus on flows or exchanges of goods, labor, ideas, and so on, but in so doing it more or less necessarily reduces the things flowing and being exchanged to the status of commodities. World literature can usefully employ that strategy in some cases; tracing, for example, the circulation of elements of the Panacatantra or the Alexander Romance. But to treat literary texts purely as commodities, and to be completely disinterested in their specificities, is to deny the literary altogether, to treat literary texts as black boxes whose contents don’t matter. There is a salutary value to doing so, as practitioners of “distant reading” and the digital humanities have pointed out16. At the same time, I would argue (and here I reveal as much as anything my own stance in the close-vs.-distant reading debates), if literary studies has anything distinctive to offer beyond its objects of study, if it has a methodology or praxis worthy of attention, then surely that lies in the attention to detail, in the careful work of

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tracing the techniques by which a literary text operates, sometimes against the expressed desires of its author. It is through the methods of close reading and of the hermeneutics of suspicion that literary studies can make, I would argue, its most distinctive contribution to humanistic inquiry—not by half-heartedly imitating the methodologies of history, sociology, or other disciplines. If literary historians treat literary texts as undifferentiated commodities, then it’s not clear why we need to treat them at all. Similarly, while songs and stories were likely as important in prehistoric (that is, pre-literate) times as they are today, and while we may in a number of cases be able to observe those songs and stories as they enter into written history (whether in Archaic Greece or in contemporary tribal communities around the world), we cannot both treat an oral tradition as timeless and write its history. Literary history (qua history) depends on being able to tell a story about change over time, and we need evidence to tell that story, evidence which is only available in the most diffuse ways (and for the contexts most immediately adjacent to writing) for non-literate societies. So linking the prehistoric (still less the pre-human) with the historic era does less work for literary history than it does for other aspects of historical inquiry. We know of a great many now-vanished cultures around the world, and their archaeological remains are often impressive, but unless those same people adopted writing themselves, or someone in contact with them did so, their songs and stories are forever lost. To generalize these problems, literature, however exactly we define it, does not flow evenly throughout a society. It is often consumed, not to say produced, largely within certain strata of society, sometimes in languages unknown to others. Texts are not given equal treatment: some are highly prized, circulate widely and are preserved for posterity; others are ephemeral (whether by intention or through a failure to win institutional support for their preservation and dissemination); still others are transmitted so as to endure a long time while circulating only narrowly. The association between literary transmission and the technology of writing tends to ensure that over the long term literature survives only to the extent it is associated with social elite—with those with the wealth and power to recopy texts. Where world historians and deep historians can pay increasing attention to those on the margins of written history—the stateless farmers, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers who may have formed a majority of the human population until recent centuries17—literary historians necessarily remain focused on the centers of power. There is a story, an important one, to be told about the literature of the subaltern, especially but not exclusively in recent centuries, but in the longue durée the focus is inevitably on texts produced by (or at the very least preserved by) cultural elites. A further fundamental challenge to the writing of global literary history lies in the question of how to divide the story up into parts. Literary histories of

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Europe, after their narrative of the Greco-Roman past, can offer parallel histories of national literatures, divided into conveniently familiar chunks: Mediaeval, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic, and so on. Of course, this narrative is problematic in most of its details with respect to most national literatures in Europe, but as a familiar and a robust narrative it’s easy to work with and provides a framework which an individual history can challenge, at least at the margins. Historians of Chinese literature can similarly organize their work by dynasties, and still do so to a great extent even though there are efforts to challenge that model around the edges,18 and literary historians in other regions have periodization of their own, with varying degrees of consensus. A global literary history, by contrast, can neither be subdivided into national-literature units, nor rely on readily available periodizations. The former is impossible partly because there are just too many literary languages in the world to treat them all separately in a global history. Worse, many languages and literatures fail to map onto anything like a modern nation-state, and their chronologies are all distinct, with old literary languages dying out and new ones emerging on very disparate timetables. Those differences of timetable, and the broader problem of “Eurochronology” are of course also the fundamental reason that global literary history cannot simply apply European periodizations to the world at large. But these difficulties go beyond the birth and death of literary languages to encompass other kinds of difficulties. Drama and fiction gradually rise in significance in China, Japan, and Europe, at the expense of classically-inspired poetry—but the chronologies are different in each region, and even this broad generalization doesn’t apply to many other regions. Whatever formal, generic, stylistic, or sociological features of literature may be identified as major drivers of historic change, are almost guaranteed to be salient to different degrees in different regions, and to operate on different schedules. For my own global literary-historical project, I have decided to create my own chronology, one which has, I hope, organic connections with a number of cultures at different periods but which cross-cuts conventional literary periodizations everywhere. My chronology is built around a few assumptions: that the spread of modern European literary forms around the globe over the past two centuries is a major event, for example, and that the broadly-based vernacularization of the later first millennium AD might be another, at least in Eurasia. The “Early Modern” may not be a readily universalizable concept, in that it assumes the modern as its telos, but perhaps we could think of a “Late Premodern”19 which would be more universalizable—a final, fullest flowering of many cultures, up until the moment they either modernized on their own, or were brutally confronted with European modernity. Karl Jaspers’ “Axial Age” seems like another such period, as an era in which texts emerged in many regions which would later become canonical

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traditions, though not necessarily with the full implications of Jaspers’ model. To identify such parallelisms is of course not to assume an overarching narrative which explains them; it is to use such empirical overlaps as seem to exist strategically, and in the full awareness that what looks like an overlap or synchronicity between two cultures will seem like an arbitrary rupture in a third. I am, therefore, structuring my history into six periods, punctuated by five major world-historical events which reshaped cultural landscapes in meaningful ways for many regions at once. These events are the rise of the Persian empire in the sixth century BC; the fall of the Han/”Crisis of the Third Century” in Rome; the Mongol conquests; the Napoleonic Wars; 1945. Although these moments do not always form recognizable borders in existing literary histories, they nearly always have a meaningful impact on literature wherever they are felt: the end of the Han/3rd century crisis, for example, marks roughly the moment at which Buddhism and Christianity, respectively, begin to shape literary developments, and when new poetic forms begin to replace those inspired by classicism in both China and Europe. The Mongol conquests, as I’ve already suggested, mark the traditional end of an era for Arabic literature, and also mark the beginnings of vernacular-inspired literature in China and in Europe.20 The link between the Mongol invasions and these developments need not be a causal connection in order to make the periodization useful. At times, these chronological divisions cut across common sense in particular local contexts—but that itself is potentially a useful observation to make. In geographic terms, my history seeks in each of its six eras to discuss together whatever the largest geographic regions within which literary texts regularly circulated. We do have to insist on “regularly” here, since we can trace reciprocal influence, for example, between Sanskrit and Ancient Egyptian beast fables, though we’re not entirely sure which way the influence went. Certain privileged stories: those of the Pancatantra, for example, or of the Alexander Romance—travelled exceptionally far. But for the most part there are smaller and more clearly defined regions within which a significant body of literature circulated at a given moment. These regions characterize the circulation not only of literary texts, but of literary languages and of poetic and prose forms as well. It seems far from accidental that the texts which circulated most widely in premodern times were mostly short prose tales (such as the beast fables of the Pancatantra) contained within an overarching frame-narrative structure21. These tales, where formal or linguistic aspects are less salient, and where the brevity of the individual units makes for easy transculturation by individuals with limited competencies, can cross cultural barriers much more readily, perhaps, than the regulations of a complex literary language or poetic form. The presence of such world-crossing texts in ancient times does not altogether, I would argue, invalidate the notion of broad cultural regions

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within which literary culture circulates intensively. Nor, for that matter, does the circulation of sacred texts, or relatedly of scientific and technical texts, each of which can seem an urgent enough project to justify enormous translation costs, in a time and place where more purely literary translations would not be undertaken.22 These spheres of circulation, or ecologies, as I have sometimes called them, in some ways resemble the “civilizations” of a Toynbee, though my divisions are intended to be non-exclusive and overlapping, fuzzy and shifting in their boundaries, and presenting very different patterns of circulation, from a strong core-and-periphery system to more polycentric cases, and with varying extents, directions, and intensities of textual flow.23 In the earliest historical periods, these literary regions are comparatively small: the literary culture of Egypt, for example, remains largely distinct from that of the ancient Near East before the Persians, even if some genres like wisdom literature do seem to travel, and both remain (so far as we can tell) quite distinct from Indian or Chinese texts of this era. Gradually, larger spaces come into operation, so that in the rough period of Jaspers’ Axial Age, arguably everything west of the Indus operates as a large cultural region, with texts, languages, and ideas circulating across the empires of Persia, the Hellenistic kings, the Parthians, and Rome. India is largely, though not entirely, distinct from this large Greater Mediterranean region, while China remains quite distinct. Links across the Mediterranean are never entirely cut, but between the conquests of Mohammed and those of Genghis Khan the Arabo-Perso-Islamicate world does form a denser node of circulation distinct from that of European Christendom. South Asia remains only partly integrated into this system, while its own literary culture is exported eastwards into Southeast Asia, and, with respect to Buddhism, also into East Asia (a region which begins to expand, as Japan and Korea begin to develop distinctive vernacular traditions). In this era, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism offer supra-regional forms of literary circulation, but denser kinds of circulation are still restricted to smaller regions. In the Late Premodern, between Genghis Khan and Napoleon, worlds expand. Europe’s conquest of the Americas offers only a limited circulation for the indigenous literatures of that continent (while contributing materially to the disappearance of much of this material), and also gradually provokes the development of new national literatures in the settler colonies. The Islamicate world similarly expands to include more and more of Africa and Southeast Asia, while the spread of Persian as a literary language within that world engulfs South Asia. East Asia remains largely apart from these larger networks, aside from the links provided by Buddhism. The global spread of European literary influences begins very faintly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with Jesuit missionaries creating literary

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texts in languages such as Chinese and Tamil. But it is really in the nineteenth century that we begin to see large-scale European influence across the remainder of Eurafrasia24. Following the Second World War, empires begin writing back, or more to the point being heard when they do so, and we begin to get the first signs of what might someday be a genuinely global system, in that a select number of writers from around the world are able to enter the global marketplace thanks to recognition received in key European and North American literary capitals—the moment Casanova would describe as Asia and Africa’s entrance into the World Republic. The past couple of paragraphs constitute one of the global histories of literature that I can imagine us writing (and it’s more or less the one I’m actually writing myself)—a history of the shifting and gradually broadening spaces within which literary texts circulate, and how texts in individual languages react to these shifts in circulation. Other versions of the story might emphasize other factors: changing technologies and media and increasing literacy shifting the audience for literature over time, for example, and consequently leading to the valorization of different genres. It would be possible to sketch a kind of global history in those terms as well, and such themes are necessarily a secondary dimension of my own history, or of any other. There are many other imaginable stories to be told about the global history of literature. Some will be best told by individuals; many will best be told by groups of specialists. Some will bring established local literary-historical narratives to a broader audience; others will take the opportunity to call those local narratives into question. We should all, I think, resist the temptation to tell a story that makes too much sense, especially at this stage; we wouldn’t want to dispose of a Whiggish narrative of progressive vernacularization only in order to replace it with some sort of neoliberal global equivalent. A global history of literature cannot simply be a history of literary globalization—the progressive erasure of national-literary barriers to entry to a global literary marketplace. Nor can it be simply a history of globalization in literature—a record of the ways in which literary texts, notably Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, increasingly serve as an index to economic globalization. Important projects each, and projects with considerable resonances, from Bruce Mazlish’s school of global history to Auerbach’s ambition for Weltliteratur “consciously to articulate the fateful coalescence of cultures.”25 A global history of literature as I describe it here must go before and beyond the story of globalization, and, lacking the guardrails of that narrative, risks doing all sorts of wrong things, from leaving out too much to leaving nothing out at all. But there is greater harm, I believe, in not trying to do the job at all, in leaving each national or local literary history (often themselves linked to questionable local political projects) to its own devices and to reject the desirability of connecting those histories in new ways.

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Notes 1

A. Beecroft, “Greek, Latin, and the Origins of ‘World Literature,’” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 5 (December 31, 2013).

2

E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon, 2006), 139.

3

R. Allen and D. S. Richards, Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

4

T. Bauer, “Mamluk Literature: Misunderstandings and New Approaches,” Mamluk Studies Review 9, 2 (2005), 105–132; M. A. Pomerantz, “An Epic Hero in the Maqāmāt? Popular and Elite Literature in the 8th/14th Century.” Annales Islamologiques, 49 (October 20, 2015): 99–114.”

5

M. Kern and R. E. Hegel, “A History of Chinese Literature?” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 26 (2004): 159–79.

6

See S. Pollock, “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 38, 1 (March 1, 2001): 3–31; and also the essays in; S. Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

7

K. Makoto, “Kangaku: Writing and Institutional Authority,” in H. Shirane and T. Suziki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, trans. D. Lurie, 1st ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 201–219.

8

For a Chinese example, see the passage from Lin Shu discussed at length at Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2015), 313–317. For more on Lin Shu, see M. Hill, Lin Shu, Inc. : Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

9

A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30; E. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013); for my own response see A. Beecroft, “Eurafrasiachronologies,” Journal of World Literature 1, 1 (2016): 17–28.

10

P. Casanova, La Republique Mondiale des Lettres (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999).

11

F. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (February 2000): 54–68.

12

Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature.

13

S. Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (July 1, 1997): 735–762.

14

A. Shryock and D. L. Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011).

15

Christian, Maps of Time an Introduction to Big History, The California World History Library 2 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

16

F. Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).

17

See as well J. C. Scott, Against the Grain A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

18

See e.g. K. Chang and S. Owen, The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which adjusts its chapter beginnings and endings so that they follow literary developments more closely than dynastic changes, but where the essential periodization is still based on dynastic history.

19

Beecroft, “Eurafrasiachronologies.”

20

One might also note that Janet Abu-Lughod saw the Mongol invasions as initiating an early economic world-system; J. L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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21

A. Beecroft, “Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern,” in E. Bulson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 43–56.

22

D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early’Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.) (London: Routledge, 2012), 138–40, on the non-translation of Homer during the era of Greek-Arabic translation. On the translation of the Buddhist canon into Chinese, see S. Hureau, “Translations, Apocrypha, and the Emergence of the Buddhist Canon,” in J. Lagerwey and P. Lü, eds., Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220-589 AD), 2 Vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 749–784.

23

Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature, 23–25.

24

A significant early example being M. Dutt and W. Radice, The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010).

25

E. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” The Centennial Review, 13, 1 (1969): 7.

Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Allen, Roger, and D. S. Richards. Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Maire and Edward W. Said, translators. The Centennial Review, 13, 1 (1969), 1–17. Bauer, Thomas. “Mamluk Literature: Misunderstandings and New Approaches.” Mamluk Studies Review 9, 2 (2005), 105–132. Beecroft, Alexander. “Greek, Latin, and the Origins of ‘World Literature.’” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 5 (December 31, 2013). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2334. ———. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2015. ———. “Eurafrasiachronologies.” Journal of World Literature 1, 1 (2016): 17–28. ———. “Rises of the Novel, Ancient and Modern.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited by E. Bulson, 43–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. https://doi. org/10.1017/9781316659694.004. Casanova, Pascale. La Republique Mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999. Chang, Kang-i Sun, and Stephen Owen. The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Christian, David. Maps of Time an Introduction to Big History. The California World History Library 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Dutt, Michael Madhusudan, and William Radice. The Poem of the Killing of Meghnad. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. London: Phaidon, 2006. Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early’Abbasaid Society (2nd-4th/5th-10th c.). London: Routledge, 2012. Hill, Michael. Lin Shu, Inc. : Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

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Hureau, Sylvie. “Translations, Apocrypha, and the Emergence of the Buddhist Canon.” In Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220-589 AD), edited by John Lagerwey and Pengzhi Lü (2 Vols.), 749–784. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Kern, Martin, and Robert E. Hegel. “A History of Chinese Literature?” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 26 (2004): 159–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/4140626. Makoto, Kurozumi. “Kangaku: Writing and Institutional Authority.” In Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, translated by David Lurie, 1st ed., 201–219. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review 1 (February 2000): 54–68. ———. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Pollock, Sheldon. “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 38, 1 (March 1, 2001): 3–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/001946460103800101. ———, ed. Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Pomerantz, Maurice A. “An Epic Hero in the Maqāmāt?. Popular and Elite Literature in the 8th/14th Century.” Annales Islamologiques, 49 (October 20, 2015): 99–114. https://doi.org/10.4000/anisl.3029. Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Shryock, Andrew and Daniel Lord Smail. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Oakland: University of California Press, 2011. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (July 1, 1997): 735–762.

CHAPTER 3

World History Needs a Better Relationship with Literary History Jonathan Arac

Abstract In a long career of practicing literary history, the author has found large-scale historians increasingly unconcerned with literary history, illustrated by contrasting E. J. Hobsbawm’s trilogy to more recent work by C. A. Bayly and others. The rise of national literatures and their study in school is a world-wide feature of the nation-state ignored by recent world historians. Even recent historians of the book seem to neglect the global spread of the novel, which scholars of world literature, such as Franco Moretti, have increasingly illuminated. The conclusion suggests that Sheldon Pollock’s work offers possible benefits to world historians: its approach and findings may prove applicable beyond the time and place directly addressed.

Keywords: Bayly, C. A.; Hobsbawm, E. J.; Pollock, Sheldon; world history; world literature

I eagerly joined this conversation when invited by Dilip Gaonkar and Neilesh Bose, because for some fifty years I have practiced literary studies—specifically, literary history—while closely attentive to dialogue with historians, both through reading and through colleagueship. As my work in this new millennium has increasingly turned to world literature, I have looked to important works of world history with which to develop this dialogue, and I have not found the resources as rewarding as I had in my earlier focus on English and American literatures and cultures. Therefore, I begin this paper by stating simply my longstanding expectations for the relationships between the disciplines of history and literature. These expectations have not controlled but certainly have guided my work for many years. Do they remain at all persuasive? I turn then to exemplify my dissatisfactions in looking to recent world historiography. Finally, I conclude with more extended discussion of Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men,1 a work far from my immediate area of study in which I find great promise for better relations between historical and literary scholarship. I start with a paragraph from The Communist Manifesto,2 which I consider the warrant for our topic of relations between World History and World Literature. The

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Manifesto sets its political goal within a powerfully influential conception of world history, within which resides world literature. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the short twentieth century of official Marxism, but the 1990s made more vivid and urgent than ever the capitalist world economy encapsulated as Globalization, amidst which we still live and struggle, at least in the pre-Pandemic world that supported the drafting of this essay. The key passage in the Manifesto begins with “world market” and ends with “world literature,” as if presaging the 1990s, rather than its own moment of 1848. Its abstractions readily conjure particulars, such as the shift in British textile production from domestic wool to cotton imported from the hot climates of the world, and the further shift in British consumption that brought to India the cultivation of tea, formerly restricted to China, and that mixed tea with sugar grown in the West Indies. Britain even exported printed cottons to India, formerly the world leader in cotton trade. We read in the Manifesto: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country… . All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries … that no longer work up indigenous raw material but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property … and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.3

The process Marx and Engels describe is destructive and leveling, as well as transformative—one world with a vengeance. This is the dialectic. Globalization was emergent when Marx and Engels wrote but became dominant in the late 20th century. Both analytic and prophetic, the Manifesto marches with its age in the power it gives to literature. Moreover, one of the major world-historical processes of the last two centuries, which cuts against the grain of the Manifesto, also draws attention to the importance of literature within world history, namely nationalism. Since the early nineteenth century, the political organization of the world has more and more favored the nation-state. It’s a commonplace, yet crucial, insight that now almost all the world’s population lives in this form of regime, while rather few did in 1800.4 All these states have schools, and all these schools teach students literature, beginning with

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the literature of their nation. Nothing like this was the case around 1800—neither the schools, not the instruction in national literature. National literatures are not the same as World Literature, but World Literature as we know it arose together with national literatures, as Aamir Mufti has powerfully argued.5 My concern to bring together world literature and world history arises in part because I specialize in the nineteenth century. The current state of discussion in our new millennium has also led me here. The Manifesto’s Marxist drive toward totalization—finding a place for the cultural institution literature within an argument about the shape and direction of the changing world—still underwrites the animating attention the political journal New Left Review and its book imprint Verso devote to world literature in our new millennium, from Franco Moretti to Alexander Beecroft. My own first words on world literature came as a response to Moretti.6 Starting with the Manifesto establishes an essential landmark, but I was not raised Marxist. My formative scholarly education took place at Harvard, the university that invented the idea of an undergraduate major (“concentration”) to transform a BA program previously defined only by free electives. This change began with an honors program called History and Literature, established in 1906, more than a decade before the overall requirement to concentrate in a department took effect. In similar spirit, in 1936 Harvard established the first interdisciplinary doctoral degree program in the History of American Civilization, a field now known, even at Harvard, as American Studies. Neither my BA nor PhD comes from these fields, but their effect shaped scholarly life beyond their strict borders. I always expected history and literature to work in active interchange, and I was delighted as an ABD teaching fellow to join the Board of Tutors, who conducted undergraduate instruction in History and Literature. This cast of mind gave major scope to intellectual history. The study of literature always featured “intellectual prose,” including on the British side writers such as Hobbes, Hume, Johnson, Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, Macaulay, and Mill, who wrote philosophy, criticism, biography, political analysis, economics, and history. In the study of America, literature began with sermons, advancing to the changes made in religious forms by Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, and beyond. Through his 2-volume study of colonial writing, The New England Mind (1939, 1950)7, the dominant Harvard Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963)—chaired professor of English but with a PhD in History—established for a generation Puritanism at the heart of what it meant to understand America. My first undergraduate year, I studied American literature in a survey taught by Miller’s prize student Alan Heimert. Reading Moby-Dick provided the most enduring gift from that course, and decades later an essay I wrote on “American world literature”8 arose from feeling the resonance with Melville in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies. For my scholarly development it proved no less memorable to hear

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Heimert’s lecture on “Political Symbolism in Moby-Dick” (soon thereafter published in American Quarterly).9 New horizons opened when I realized that a work of such imaginative splendor as Melville’s could be connected so closely to the details of the political debates amidst which its author lived (I emulated such connection in “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter”).10 Three years after the encounter with Melville, I learned the same lesson in far greater detail through the semester course on Dostoevsky taught by Joseph Frank, then still a decade away from publishing even the first volume of what eventually became his five-volume, 2500-page study of Dostoevsky. Frank details the impacts of English, French, and German literatures and intellectual prose on Russian conservatism, populism, and radicalism from the 1830s up to 1880, combining intellectual history and the detail of political argumentation to provide an unparalleled integration of literature at its greatest with history at its most serious.11. Yet I never learned Russian nor studied to become an Americanist. I didn’t know then the term “American exceptionalism” but I felt its weight. I wanted a study that gave more scope to international connection, and like Melville himself, I had been swept off my feet by Shakespeare. The study of British literature did not feel like ‘our heritage’—perhaps because my parents had both been born into Yiddish-speaking households—but rather a step into a large, new, strange world. I had already begun literary study in French, Greek, and Latin, before I started to learn the skills of intense critical analysis in English. My specialization became Victorian Studies. In the 1960s, the most illuminating and inspiring work in that area came from what has been called “British cultural Marxism,” for me especially the work of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson.12 Williams’s Culture and Society opened several important windows. In the study of intellectual prose it demonstrated a crucial role for close verbal analysis—comparable to what the mid-century movement known in the US as New Criticism had practiced first on poetry and then, less influentially, on novels. (Who would have thought it, but this perspective from Williams opened a path for me to grasp Derrida a decade later.) Williams also first made clear to me that a deep and active concern with the current direction of politics could motivate profound historical scholarship. Thompson’s masterpiece The Making of the English Working Class spoke to a young scholar of literature through its quotations from the poetry of William Blake, but another way in which his work made the connection between history and literature came from the work’s overall procedure. Much of Thompson’s book reads as if it were a discursively commented anthology of previously obscure working-class writings on social and economic issues, intellectual prose from below. His commitment to rescue his subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity”13 provided an always compelling historiographic rule of thumb, no less applicable

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when metamorphosed by literary critic Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism.14 Said condemned the “rhetoric of blame”15 addressed by current critics to older texts whose politics we no longer respect or care to understand. Williams and Thompson faced criticism even in their own time for too insular a focus on England, but Thompson made clear in his preface that he had written the book for a larger world, hoping that decolonizing nations would escape the path of capitalist (and Soviet) developmentalist economics and learn from what the English had failed to achieve a century before. Thompson’s explicit concern with global transformation—part of his Marxism—helped make him available to Indian Subaltern Studies historians for inspiration and critique. It expanded my intellectual horizons when shortly after I came to the University of Pittsburgh, around 1990, my then colleague Gayatri Spivak brought a cluster of the Subaltern Studies historians to campus for several days of lectures and discussions. It instructed and animated me to find Thompson passionately debated in this new body of ongoing work, concerning a part of the world I had ignored, despite having heard that Midnight’s Children was a great novel. From an early point in my education, then, I understood that the study of literature and the study of history went together, that each could speak usefully to the other. I understood that major scholars of history on a large scale—not quite yet called world history—would consider it part of their responsibility to address literature—not yet called world literature (but see Hobsbawm 1962, 390)—and would do it well. I learned this and formed my expectation for the future from reading Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution: 1789-184816 (The author did not yet know that this volume would prove the first of four, published over the next three decades—1975, 1987, 1995—bringing the world up to 1991.) From his own disciplinary home base, in the “dual revolution” of French politics and British industry, Hobsbawm reaches out from this “twin crater of a …larger regional volcano”17 to “trace … the transformation of the world”18 that followed. Over the years, my scholarly expectations from the 1960s have been disappointed—though reawakened by the prospects this collaborative volume opens. As I dig into recent, post-Hobsbawm, major works of world history that embrace the 19th century, I see less and less attention to literature, C. A. Bayly to Jürgen Osterhammel to the collaborators of A World Connecting, 1870-1945.19 In his three volumes on the long 19th century, Hobsbawm has more attention to literature than in the more recent three combined (despite their far greater page count).20 You can read Hobsbawm and learn that the novel was a major cultural form in some parts of the world (and increasingly more parts). In A World Connecting you cannot learn anything about the novel as a major cultural form or fact of the period. Yet between Hobsbawm’s work and theirs the literary scholar Franco Moretti edited a massive and excellent collaborative work—The Novel (nearly 1900 pages in

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the 2-volume English abridgment of the original Italian 5 volumes)—drawing on scholars addressing many major languages and cultures of the world.21 For the period 1870—1945, The Novel has especially impressive treatments of Brazil, China, India, and Japan, but it’s not even in the bibliography of A World Connecting. The flourishing of the novel across a newly wide range of national cultures was one form of world connection around 1900, and felt to be so by its participants, both readers and writers, but somehow this part of history no longer counts as history, no more than does the teaching of national literatures in nation-states across the world, to which I referred earlier. Let me specify some of the problems I find in the current relations of world history to world literature. In Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World: 1780-1914, his several pages “Towards World Literature” say things that seem to me highly informative concerning cultures I know little of, but where he addresses Western literature it amazes me that a now sadly deceased famous polymath, my exact contemporary, in a neighboring discipline commits grave, embarrassing errors, which his publisher should have spared him.22 He states that the seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine “still used the form of the classical Greek comedy” in his “plays of men and morals.”23 He’s nearly right, except Racine wrote tragedy not comedy (9 tragedies and two scriptural dramas to one comedy, which is not in the least Greek-modeled). Bayly asserts of James Joyce that “his great novels … later in the century pioneered a subversive literary sensibility.”24. Which century could that be? Joyce was born in 1882, died 1941, and his most famously subversive novels—the ones that faced censorship—appeared in 1914 and 1922; he’s generally considered a major writer of the early twentieth century. Bayly claims also that “In Western Europe the new literature was announced in the novels of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Baudelaire.”25. Dickens’s first major work, The Pickwick Papers (1837), appeared before Hardy was born (1840); Dickens (1870) and Baudelaire (1867) were both dead before Hardy published his first novel, Desperate Remedies (1871); and Baudelaire, who did not write novels, is world famous for his lyric poetry, above all Les fleurs du mal (1857). Am I nitpicking? After all, comedy or tragedy, novels or poetry, it’s all great literature. But surely a historian can get facts right? I wonder if the publishers of ambitious history draw a line at editorial fact-checking for materials that seem off the book’s main path. Trying to bring literature and history together turns out to be surprisingly hard! You need to ask a lot of colleagues to look things over for you, because if you don’t, no one else will. In A World Connecting you could never learn that one world-event of the earlier twentieth century was a movement in the arts now known as Modernism.26 In its five independently authored sections, there is no passage with the synthesizing authority Hobsbawm achieves for the same period:

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Perhaps nothing illustrates the identity crisis through which bourgeois society passed in this period better than the history of the arts from 1870 to 1914… . [B]oth the creative arts and the public for them lost their bearings. The former reacted to this situation by a flight forward into innovation and experiment, increasingly linked to utopianism or pseudo-theory. The latter, unless converted by fashion and snob-appeal … retreated into the sphere of ‘classic’ works whose excellence was guaranteed by the consensus of generations. Yet the very concept of such a consensus was under fire… .[T]he traditional kingdom of high culture was undermined by an even more formidable enemy: the arts appealing to common people and (with the partial exception of literature) revolutionized by the combination of technology and the discovery of the mass market.27

Of course I do not agree with every statement made, but this is a scholar you could debate with. Hobsbawm writes as if he knows his topic, his argument, and his readership, and he connects the arts to a major concern of his book—and of the 4-book series—that is, the state of the bourgeoisie. Based on its treatment of literary matters, I can’t make out the readership imagined for A World Connecting. Many of what I would have considered inevitable figures in discussing the arts are wholly absent: for example, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Emile Zola (all in Hobsbawm). Even more puzzling to me, the English novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) appears only once, as making money by investing in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, allowing us to “appreciate the embeddedness of the world of literary culture in trajectories of empire, as well as the role of middle-class British women in the imperial corporate economy.”28 She is not identified as a novelist, let alone as the author of Middlemarch, a novel many consider the greatest British work of the century. Apparently we are expected already to know all that and need learn only of her investment. Likewise the German novelist, Nobelist, and anti-Hitler activist Thomas Mann appears uniquely as an émigré to the US (“Princeton and Pacific Palisades,”)29 his location evidently more worth knowing than anything he wrote. Section four, on “Commodity Chains in a Global Economy,” concludes “As William Faulkner warned us, ‘The past is never dead, it is not even past’” (not quite as Faulkner wrote it).30 That’s the only mention of Faulkner in 1161 pages. Clearly this finale treats Faulkner as shared canonical knowledge. But what does it mean for history-writing if it understands its task as choosing not to discuss canonical materials, presumably because of some understanding that we no longer value canons (except when they allow us to end with better words than we would have written ourselves)? As the example of Bayly shows, even an extraordinarily erudite senior scholar cannot be trusted to keep canonical figures straight when rapidly referring to them. All the less, the doctoral students in global history whom I imagine reading A World Connecting.

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Nothing is harder than deciding what your reader needs to be told or wishes to learn about. I have found the same problem with historians much closer to literary study, namely historians of the book. As noted above, the flourishing of the novel across a newly wide range of national cultures was one form of world connection around 1900, and felt to be so by its participants. In 1899 William Dean Howells (1837-1920), a major novelist, as well as America’s most respected literary critic, a reviewer who treated new works, not yet available in English, from France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain, crafted a lecture on “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading,” which he toured to over fifty venues that year. Howells asserted: Fiction is the great intellectual stimulus of our time… . It is ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that the book which at any given moment is making the world talk, and making the world think, is a novel. Within the last generation, I can remember only one book making the impression that a dozen of novels have each made, and against Renan’s Life of Jesus, I will set Les Miserable [sic], Romola and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, L’Assommoir and Nana, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Anna Karenina and the Kreuzer Sonata, Robert Ellsmere, Trilby, Ben Hur.31

From a different perspective, Henry James (1843-1916) perceived a similar dominance. James wrote in his 1900 essay on “The Future of the Novel”: “[T]he place occupied in the world by the prolonged prose fable has become, in our time, among the incidents of literature, the most surprising example to be named of swift and extravagant growth, a development beyond the measure of every early appearance… . The flood at present swells and swells, threatening the whole field of letters… . The book, in the Anglo-Saxon world, is almost everywhere, and it is in the form of the voluminous prose fable that we see it penetrate easiest and farthest.”32 James emphasizes not the novel’s intellectual clout but rather its place within mass consumption, as part of a newly widespread literacy. Howells seems to be saying, “Good for the novel,” while James, although himself even more committed to novel writing than Howells was, expresses some alarm. But both concur on the centrality and dominance of the novel, amidst the world of books. Claims like those that Howells and James made are important historical documents. They illuminate what novelists as critics thought about the circumstances and importance of their art and trade. Yet such documents are inherently dubious. Was the novel such a big deal? What does scholarship show? Therefore, I turned to the vigorously emergent subfield known as History of the Book for context and data that would allow me to understand better how to think about such claims. No major art form of the last 400 years is more closely tied to a specific material base than the novel to the book. From 2007 to 2010, the University of North Carolina Press

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published a History of the Book in America, 5 volumes taking the story from “The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World” to “The Enduring Book” of the last seventy years. The three volumes most relevant to my inquiry—from 1840 to 1880, 1880 to 1940, and 1940 to the present—run to about 1800 pages (some eighty contributors, about half historians). These volumes are full of valuable information of all sorts, but I was startled to find almost nothing about the novel. It has amazed me to discover that the novel as a cultural fact proves merely a mote in the eye of History of the Book. In the index of volume 3, “fiction” has about six scattered pages, and “novel” does not appear, nor does either appear in the table of contents. Volume 4 has a few more entries and page-count for ‘fiction’ than either of the other volumes; it actually includes an index entry on “novels”—but fiction is the more important category. In the index of volume 5, again novels do not appear, and fiction is represented by three clusters: a few mentions for “sexual expression” and “young adults”; several consecutive pages on “Protestant fiction” and half-a-dozen pages on “fiction in magazines.” But a statistical appendix to this volume tabulates from 1950 to 2005 “New Book Titles by Category.” There are 23 categories, including “fiction.” Number 1 at start and end, and never lower than #2, is Fiction. The very slight attention the volume pays to fiction seems to ignore the lesson that its own figures teach. I think the novel is so much taken for granted as a major cultural form that it gains the historian no points to discuss it. It hides in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter. Perhaps this is the whole problem literature poses for historians. I conclude by praising a great book that I have not seen discussed enough, and which intersects World Literature and World History. Its author Sheldon Pollock identifies himself as a philologist, a now obscure discipline that embraces history and literature through their shared concerns with language. Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, earns its nearly 700 pages by achieving a literary-historical study of the highest ambition and execution.33 Its accomplishments and arguments merit searching discussion and also active use both by scholars of world history and of world literature.34 It excites me that Pollock’s work is a masterpiece of literary study set long before modernity—approximately the first millennium of the Common Era—and yet it develops its materials to raise world-historical questions still relevant now amidst multiculturalism and postcoloniality. I am not expert in Sanskrit, and the only Indian language I know is English. Therefore I value greatly that Pollock has written his book with high lucidity, sharing his profound scholarship and technical philological expertise with a general reader, as I find myself in this context. He has findings to change the shape of his own Indological field, but he wants his results to reach more widely, and he’s made it possible for his scholarship to make that difference.

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Pollock shapes an exciting narrative. After centuries as a language used exclusively within a religious context, Sanskrit drastically changes function to become a language of literature, and soon thereafter its literary resources serve to proclaim the grandeur of kings. (The documents available to us come especially as inscriptions on stone monuments.) For hundreds of years more, this regal-poetic complex, a union of culture and power, expands geographically, not only across India but also great distances into southeast Asia, including modern Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Java. This expansion came not through conquest but rather through cultural adaptation—Sanskrit seemed the perfect vehicle for certain important uses by people in different places and polities. Then another huge change: literature began in vernacular languages, which had already for centuries served as a form of writing for many everyday purposes. Just as had happened in Sanskrit, power and culture came together in the vernacular. An active theorization of poetics accompanied the production of inscriptions heralding royal grandeur, first in South India with the non-Indo-European, Dravidian languages, Kannada (the case Pollock develops in detail), Telugu, and Tamil; later in the north, where the vernaculars derive from Sanskrit. Contrary to many ideologies of vernacularity, this emergence of vernacular literature did not come from below but rather from elite sectors wholly steeped in Sanskrit knowledge and techniques, but now turning those skills to a new purpose in a new language, a deliberately place-based language, in contrast to the cosmopolitan, in principle universal, claim of Sanskrit. I’ve used about three hundred words for what Pollock delivers in over 400 pages. His book is long, but not at all overly lengthy. Not only does he make the case in detail, he made me care about the details. I would not have expected to find English versions of thousand-year-old Sanskrit royal pillar inscriptions poetically powerful, but he brings the force and beauty, if not the actual sound-harmonies, into English. Likewise some of the niceties in treatises on poetics. Back over forty years ago, when I read Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), its fundamental argument won my assent.35 Said asserted that Orientalist discourse was a closed system of knowledge/power, more the product of domination than a way to understand actual human activities in another part of the world. I credited his assertion because I had tried at various times to read what were supposed to be valuable works about the Middle East, and had found that, because of their presuppositions, I didn’t think I was learning anything I could believe. By contrast, Pollock makes his historical account and its actors come alive. They’re not just like me, very different indeed, but the constellation of action and achievement that he demonstrates over a thousand years, across many miles and many languages, makes sense. Sanskrit poetics, even in its vernacular variants, is the least demotic imaginable, yet Pollock persuades me that he is a human being writing about human beings.

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Therefore, I’m compelled by the extensions from his primary materials, which he makes in three stages. First, he recognizes that the Sanskrit “Cosmopolis” of culture and power with a claim to universality seems highly comparable to the roughly contemporaneous case of Rome and Latin. (In the Aeneid Jupiter promises Rome empire without end: Imperium sine fine dedi.) Pollock underlines what seem to him the major differences. There was no Indian political unit corresponding to the Roman Empire under one single ruler; Sanskrit auto-panegyric spread from king to king, across independent polities. And Sanskrit coexisted as an elite language with diverse languages of everyday life, by contrast to the process through which Latin overrode and eventually eliminated local languages throughout much of Europe (before then morphing into their new vernaculars). It’s not because I’m ungrateful that I ask for more. This argument about Latin and Sanskrit cries out for more development concerning the two massive cultural/political complexes that arose in the geographical space between them, about a thousand years apart—that is, the spread of Greek precipitated by Alexander’s conquests and the spread of Arabic after the revelation to the Prophet. Ronit Ricci has already begun part of this next step.36 Pollock’s second extension compares the Indian vernacular experience to the European vernacular revolution, again, roughly contemporaneous. His largest point I wholly share, that we need far more serious research on European languages in what it still makes some sense to call the Dark Ages, because we have cast so little light on them. His next point also wins my assent, namely that in Europe, as in India with Sanskrit, vernacular literature came from writers already expert in Latin, from the Beowulf poet to Dante. The major difference that Pollock seeks to develop needs further work, but it is persuasively suggestive, namely that the rhetoric of European vernacular identification, in ways familiar to us all, became biologized, a matter of blood, quite unlike the forms of geographical, place-based identification in Indian vernaculars. In a later essay, Pollock offers a memorably compact self-summary of these two major arguments from The Language of the Gods, which have purchase for fields of study across the larger world. Illustrating the “radically different, even counterintuitive maps of culture and power and of their relationship to each other” that deep study of the past may reveal, Pollock cites his finding “a noncoercive cosmopolitanism, which knew nothing of the tyranny to ‘be like us’, and, coexisting with this, a voluntary vernacularity, which knew nothing of the compulsions of ethnicity.”37 Pollock’s polemical use of “noncoercive” and “voluntary” underlines the potentially liberating difference he finds. At the same time, it reminds me, and likely other readers too, that his great work studies only elite practices, and that there is a whole possible history from below—where so much is coercive and too little is voluntary—that his findings do nothing to offer us.

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However, Pollock’s work may serve and strengthen work taking quite a different social stance from what he offers in The Language of the Gods. His thoughts on vernacular came home to me because of my own encounter with twentieth-century American discourses on literary vernacular; in my work for a book concerning Huckleberry Finn I had found American vernacular theory to be, however inadvertently, racist.38 The overall topic of vernacular requires further development across subfields of literature and history, because the way that Pollock uses the term, especially its derivative ‘vernacularization’, differs not only from the American usage I found, but also from the way the term functions in nineteenth-century colonial discourses,39 and again in some important recent work concerning colonialism.40 Pollock’s third extension opens to modern discourses of social theory (from the nineteenth century on) and postcolonialism, as well as to current Indian history at the time he was writing, a context that has become yet more widely important as various forms of nativism and populism arise across the world’s polities. His arguments concerning religious issues of Sanskrit and vernacular cut broadly in a secular direction, and combined with his critique of ethnicist vernacularism add up to a large critique of contemporary Hindu nationalist premises, as he states. More likely to prove controversial in the world of scholarship, he argues that his evidence cuts against many forms of determinism, from Marxism on up, that provide our go-to frames for large-scale thought on historical change. He certainly does not hold that people are at all times free to do whatever they want, but he develops strong cases against the overriding force attributed to language and to culture in a wide range of current multiculturalisms. He values language and culture but finds them resources rather than limits. The largest claim Pollock offers speaks on behalf of a deeply engaged history, not afraid to find better and worse choices among the materials it analyzes, with the task of illuminating the diversity of human possibilities. He hopes that knowing what people have been capable of, not only negatively, but positively, may inspire freer and better choices in the future that our present leads to. To make this argument, Pollock specifically calls out for rejection one of the most authoritative and prestigious writers on the historical understanding of Western political thought, Quentin Skinner, whose claim of scholarly neutrality Pollock finds both unpersuasive and undesirable.41 As opposed to Pollock’s overall lucidity, this invigorating and important page is buried in the Epilogue, and Skinner does not appear in the Index. Having thus far elaborated my great admiration, I will add a caveat from the place where I know and care about something more, it seems, than Pollock does. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men through its strong philology offered me a combination of scrupulous detail in the service of horizon-opening vistas in a way that few other works do. One of those few is Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946, tr. 1953).42 Yet Pollock shows

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no evidence of having read Mimesis. It is not quoted or mentioned. Auerbach as a name is several times referred to in laudatory terms, but always to be disagreed with, and in ways that to my understanding a deeper grasp of Mimesis would render unnecessary. I absolutely do not test scholars by their level of Auerbach-approval, but since Pollock is among the best, I want him to do better. In a bizarre error, he attributes to a note in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt’s Practicing New Historicism43 the claim that Auerbach thought “the history of literature is … that of realist painting.”44 Nothing approaching these words appears on the page Pollock cites (and I reviewed Gallagher and Greenblatt’s full 15-page discussion of Auerbach to make sure it wasn’t just a tiny typo). There is a lot to debate concerning Auerbach’s views on reality and realism, but to attribute to Auerbach, via a secondary source, the view that literature is valuable when it is “a simple mimetic enterprise”45 makes nonsense of what he meant by mimesis. Mimesis analyzes verbal representations, and one particular verbal practice proves what the book most values and seeks to demonstrate historically. This desideratum is a particular stylistic effect that combines two aspects of language that European cultures strove for many centuries to segregate: classical models, especially syntactic structures, of high eloquence combine with the materials (including vocabulary) of everyday life, which had by long tradition and practice been confined to comic literature, the lives of people not to be taken seriously, to be ridiculed, not compassionated. The greatest moments in Auerbach’s book come in his chapter on Dante, where recently deceased sinners provide the low-life, but where Auerbach elaborates in fascinating detail the linguistic means by which Dante brings this material to the summit of artistic power. I felt, perhaps mistakenly, echoes of Auerbach when Pollock is introducing his first great citation written in Kannada: “This is unprecedented vernacularity, entirely new in lexicon, style, and mode of representation. It is powerfully infused with Sanskrit idiom and grandiloquence … however much these are tempered by the predominantly Kannada idiom that follows.”46 This greatly resembles the way Mimesis shows that for the first time in a thousand years Dante deploys a specific usage from Vergil, bringing classical grandiloquence into the vernacular.47 I hope my colleagues in history will agree that this sketch of Pollock’s book establishes that a major work of literary history may be directly available for conversation with world historians. The large idea, as I see it, is straightforward: modes of state power and their relations to particular institutions of language form an appropriate topic for historiographic exploration. Pollock argues that historians may investigate sources differently from what usual practice has dictated. Given a royal commemorative inscription, one need not limit analysis to finding out if the death-toll of the battles named can be validated by other sources. Instead one may realize that language is being put to a radically new use, and in a structurally

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regulated way. What does it mean for a king to make such statements and in such a way? The historical point of the royal pillar inscriptions Pollock cites and analyzes is not the factuality of their content but their significance as a form of social action.48 Through Pollock I have found this place I imagine fruitful for conversation between historians and literary scholars; earlier, above, growing from Benedict Anderson’s reflections on nationalism, I had found a topic concerning national literary education; W. D. Howells and Henry James pointed to another topic, I found, connected to book history.49 The opportunities are there in these cases and many more. Can we motivate scholars to do the work that will reanimate this currently lapsed dialogue?

Notes 1

S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Power, and Culture in Premodern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).

2

K. Marx, and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Trans. Samuel Moore, revised by Friedrich Engels, in M. Puchner, ed., The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005).

3

Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 10–11.

4

The starting point for much work of the last forty years is Anderson, and more recently see P. Manning, A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), Chapter 9, section on “Nations Displace Empires, 1870-1970.”

5

A. R. Mufti. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36, 3 (2010): 458–493.

6

J. Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review new series 16 (2002): 35–45.

7

P. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

8

J. Arac, “Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy in American World Literature,” in J. Di Leo, ed., American Literature as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 149–63.

9

A. Heimert, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism.” American Quarterly 15, 4 (Winter, 1963): 498–534.

10

J. Arac, “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter,” in S. Bercovitch and M. Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 247–266. Literary study as I entered it was thus very different from the context-free model criticized by Bruce Robbins in his outstanding essay “What World History Does World Literature Need?” in M. Hawas, ed., The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (New York: Routledge, 2018), 194–206.

11

See J. Arac, “Joseph Frank: Unfashionable Intelligence,” boundary 2 47, 2 (2020): 5–17.

12

R. Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958) and E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).

13

Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 12.

14

E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

15

Said, Culture and Imperialism, 81.

world history needs a better relationship with literary history 89

16

E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962).

17

Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, 18.

18

Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, xv.

19

C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004); J. Osterhammel. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century Trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); E. S. Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting: 1870-1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

20

Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (New York, Pantheon, 1975); E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (New York: Pantheon, 1987).

21

F. Moretti, ed. The Novel. 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

22

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914.

23

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, 386.

24

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, 389.

25

Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914, 388.

26

See now A. Moody, and S. J. Ross, eds., Global Modernists on Modernism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

27

Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875-1914, 219–220.

28

Rosenberg, A World Connecting: 1870-1945, 365.

29

Rosenberg, A World Connecting: 1870-1945, 577.

30

Rosenberg, A World Connecting: 1870-1945, 812.

31

W. D. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, vol. 3, in Selected Edition of William Dean Howells, vol. 30. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 227, (styling as in source).

32

H. James, Literary Criticism Volume 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers – English Writers, edited by Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 100.

33

Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men.

34

For notable uses, see A. Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (London: Verso, 2015); and P. Manning, A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

35

E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

36

R. Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast

37

S. Pollock, “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.” Critical Inquiry 35, 4

Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). (2009): 956 n. 67. 38

J. Arac, Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

39

A. D. Lienau, Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone: an ACLA Forum. Special issue of Comparative Literature 70, 2 (2018).

40

A. R. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

41

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 570.

42

E. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946, tr. 1953). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003.

43

C. Gallagher, and S. Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

44

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 284.

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45

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 267.

46

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 336.

47

See Auerbach, Mimesis, 178–83.

48

My discussion of Pollock overlaps closely with Arac, “Ways of Working with Language.” boundary

49

B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:

2 48, 1 (2021): 10–14. I reuse it here in hope of reaching historians. Verso, 2016); Howells, Selected Literary Criticism; and James, Literary Criticism Volume 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers – English Writers.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2016. Arac, Jonathan. “The Politics of The Scarlet Letter.” In Ideology and Classic American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, 247–266. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. ———. “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review new series 16 (2002): 35–45. ———. “Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy in American World Literature.” In American Literature as World Literature, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo, 149–63. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. ———. “Joseph Frank: Unfashionable Intelligence.” boundary 2 47, 2 (2020): 5–17. ———. “Ways of Working with Language.” boundary 2 48, 1 (2021): 3–15. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946, tr. 1953). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2003. Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Verso, 2015. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Heimert, Alan. “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism.” American Quarterly 15, 4 (Winter, 1963): 498–534. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. New York: New American Library, 1962. ———. The Age of Capital: 1848-1875. New York, Pantheon, 1975. ———. The Age of Empire: 1875-1914. New York: Pantheon, 1987. Howells, William Dean. Selected Literary Criticism, vol. 3, in Selected Edition of William Dean Howells, vol. 30. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. James, Henry. Literary Criticism Volume 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers – English Writers, edited by Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. Lienau, Annette Damayanti, ed. Vernacular Comparisons beyond the Europhone: an ACLA Forum. Special issue of Comparative Literature 70, 2 (2018). Manning, Patrick. A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

world history needs a better relationship with literary history 91

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Trans. Samuel Moore, revised by Friedrich Engels. In The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings, edited by Martin Puchner. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. ———. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Moody, Alys, and Stephen J. Ross, eds. Global Modernists on Modernism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Moretti, Franco, ed. The Novel. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Mufti, Aamir R. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. ———. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36, 3 (2010): 458–493. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Power, and Culture in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. ———. “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.” Critical Inquiry 35, 4 (2009): 931–961. Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Robbins, Bruce. “What World History Does World Literature Need?” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas, 194–206. New York: Routledge, 2018. Rosenberg, Emily S., ed. A World Connecting: 1870-1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. ———. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage, 1966. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.

CHAPTER 4

Re-Gifting Theory to Europe: The Romantic Worlds of Nineteenth-Century India Kedar Kulkarni

Abstract How was intellectual exchange in the colonies a vital arena for the ferment of twentieth-century theory, especially of foundational figures? This chapter explores the colonial connections between Romantic thought and the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (1850-1882) combined Herderian ideas about the naturalness of language, Kantian notions of the beautiful and the sublime, and, significantly, Sanskrit aesthetics’ tradition of implication in poetry to formulate a redefinition of literature that syncopated with his global zeitgeist. But the ideas from Sanskrit were the same ideas and texts that give rise to Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. I revisit this moment in order to expose the global dimension of theory, showcasing colonial entanglements in a way that questions the originality of thinkers such as Saussure.

Keywords: Marathi; Romanticism; Sanskrit; Saussure; World Literature

There is a relatively straight line that connects Romantic theorists of poetry from William Jones, Johann Herder, through Hegel, John Stuart Mill, to Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (viṣṇuśāstrī cipaḷuṇkara, 1850-1883). Who?—you may ask of the latter person. And there is an equally straight line that connects that same person, Chiplunkar, to the early twentieth-century grammarians such as Ferdinand Saussure and William D. Whitney. This chapter explores these connections, especially the figure of Chiplunkar, in order to describe how romantic poetic theories migrated during the course of the nineteenth century, creating and inflecting notions of literature’s worldliness that are central to this volume’s theme. Worldliness was intimately connected with the way literature was said to operate, to describe its poetic “force” that gave a literary work dimensions that exceeded the type-set, rectangular, space of the printed word.1 This chapter some processes that chart the fortunes of “literature” and “literariness” as concepts in western India, their relationship to larger, global currents, and their worldly dimension. As may be evident, the lexicon of the “world” is largely drawn from recent and slightly older work in literary studies—especially Pheng Cheah’s distinction between the

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“world” as an ontological category and the “globe” as a space in 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 chapter, in order to deploy alternative, rooted (worldly), but nonetheless connected (global) conceptual bases for analysis.2 In the first half, I describe and analyze the parameters of “literature,” as a concept in western India, and its theoretical underpinnings. Most consequential to literature’s definition are a tradition of wandering, bardic poets known as shahirs (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 colonial-institutional, literary reading, and editorial practices that were part of a global zeitgeist in Egypt, the US, and the English curriculum in colonial India.3 In the latter, second half of this chapter, beginning with “Beyond Romanticism”, I move away from the śāhīrs and instead approach an important figure in Marathi scholarship, Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar, who was instrumental in outlining a definition of literature that placed śāhīrī poetry at its core. He transformed the categorical life of “literature” by combining Marathi paradigms with those from Romanticism, with which he was well-versed. Given the pervasive discourse of colonialism as a “gift” from the colonizer to the colonized (a gift horse that was, and should continue to be, looked in the mouth), I speak about the “re-gift” from the colonized to the colonizer, via Chiplunkar.4 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.”5 If orientalist discourse was part of the intellectual contexts of the early and mid-nineteenth century, the late nineteenth and early twentieth unabashedly tried to bury the importance of the colonized’s gift. Using Chiplunkar’s understanding of poetry, I wish to exhume that regift. 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 ones that Pheng Cheah deploys, and to define them in a more precise way that enables the real imaginative contours of the colonized’s gift (to the colonizer) to shine.6

Part 1: Setting Terms: What was “Literature”? At the outset, it is important to establish the problem of “literature” as a conceptual category in South Asia—there are no satisfying translations that capture the term’s full semantic range. Understanding what literature was enables us to better see

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what Chiplunkar’s intervention was. The English term “literature” is a misleading synonym for two terms used interchangeably in Marathi to denote something akin to the concept of “literature”: vāṅmaya and sāhitya. The first, vāṅmaya, is a nominalization of the verbal root √vac, “speak” from Sanskrit, with the suffix maya, “made of/consisting of.” Together, they combine to suggest a meaning of vāṅmaya 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 “read.” Hence paḍhanā (“to read”) in Hindi, paṛatē in Bengali, paṛhana in Punjabi. These subtle semantic modulations tangentially point to differing notions of literacy, which have always been complicated in South Asia, 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).7 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 pre-colonial bard performed in Marathi, he had his notebook of composed poetry, called a bāḍa, but only used it as a reference guide. The real authority lay in the performance.8 So too, O’Hanlon has argued that in legal and political settings in early modern India, the oratorical performance was conspicuously more important than what may have been written down, and often impressed upon and changed the written word.9 In this way, it does make sense to think of the Marathi vāṅmaya as something carrying the legacy of Sanskrit. It is a concept that persists to this day, albeit now reduced in usage, either specifically in reference to oral forms, or otherwise synonymous with sāhitya, the second term, in popular discourse. Sāhitya is the more expansive, more recent, and arguably more objectivized term found emblazoned across official literary societies all over India. Semantically, sāhitya can be quite ambiguous and doesn’t even appear as a stand-alone term for literature (of any sort) in the definitive nineteenth-century Marathi dictionary, except in compound form of sāhitya-śāstra or the science of sāhitya, with reference to the Sanskrit discourse on literature, grammar, and poetics.10 In Tulpule and Feldhaus’s dictionary of old Marathi too, the term is defined through the Sanskrit, and refers primarily to rhetoric and literary style, rather than literature itself.11 Sāhitya’s misleading root is √dhā, “put” whose past tense can take the form hita; with the prefix sa “with” it becomes akin to “put together with” something. As a noun, sāhitya can also be a tool or implement required to produce something.12 Both dictionaries above list multiple definitions of sāhitya as a tool or implement.

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With an adjective, for example, it can refer to specific tools or implements, as in pūjece sāhitya, the tools/implements/utensils for pūja, or svayaṃpākāce sāhitya, kitchen utensils. Moreover, sāhitya’s usage first becomes prominent in late classical Sanskrit literary theory, not even in kāvya, epic poetry.13 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 organization 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 1949.14 Significantly, sāhitya bears some noteworthy attributes that distinguish it from vāṅmaya that are relevant here: there is a sense of objectification in sāhitya, literature as an objectivized thing: a literary text as an art object. In Marathi (and perhaps for a few other Indian languages), a clearer delineation between vāṅmaya and sāhitya enables the contextualization of a literary culture in which literature and language prior to nineteenth-century print culture were primarily spoken, relying only at a secondary level on the manuscript. That is, whereas vāṅmaya offered temporally and spatially bound experiences of the world, more akin to a species of worldliness, sāhitya offered an objectified, detached representation of the world that had the potential to circulate. That is, sāhitya was one object among many that circulated within an empty homogeneous “global” space. In these distinctions, I see the problem of “literature”—caught between something locally situated, with a concrete audience, and something otherwise, designed to extended beyond its point of origin, not something that may, following Damrosch, simply “gain” in translation.15 Śāhirī poetry, the extensive tradition of itinerant bardic poetry that emerged in the Marathi language from the late seventeenth century and gained momentum in the eighteenth, has been touted as emblematic of popular and worldly (laukika) literature (vāṅmaya) in this regard.16 “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.17 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 capitalized on the ability of poets to compose poetry for public performance, temporally and spatially bound, not for private (circulating) readership: vāṅmaya not sāhitya. Vāṅmaya 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

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constituted by that literature—a topic I have examined elsewhere, in relation to translations and revivals of the Sanskrit play Shakuntala.18 In the emergent sāhitya and the prior vāṅmaya, therefore, we should see some resonance with the way Bose frames the introduction, and this volume more generally. These categories demonstrate a central tension evident and apparent in the paradigms of world literature and global history itself, and of course, the institutions and genres that may be visible, flourish, or be sustained depending upon how one theorizes and teaches literature: how often do courses on world literature include oral epics, for example? Rarely, I suspect, preferring novels that incorporate oral literatures instead. Preferring a kind of sāhitya to a kind of vāṅmaya. Born Translated indeed!19 Marathi as a Poetic Language When it comes to language, foregrounding the way literature (as aesthetic use of language) and (communicative) language are co-constituted (or re-constituted), as categories through romantic tropes enables us to also observe the specifically laukika (worldly) nature of romantic ideology in its Indian setting. In western India, we observe a worldly romantic ideology that is part and parcel of a global discourse, growing in nineteenth-century soils. There is something beyond the literal, that isn’t merely mimetic, merely a representation of the world—whether expressive or otherwise—that is at the foundational moment of romanticism, worldliness, and vernacular language studies.20 Historiography that fails to see the latent and overt romanticism in vernacular linguistic theories also fails to capture the doubly communicative and aesthetic dimension of language politics of the mid-late nineteenth-century milieu that constituted the worldly dimension of language.21 Romantic thinkers were not simply “prophets of (European) linguistic nationalism,” as Ramaswamy has remarked in her book about Tamil, especially given then global afterlives.22 While there was no overt “Ossian” or “Herderian Revolution” in western India as elsewhere in the world,23 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.24 Further themes such as divisions between “classical” and romantic literature,25 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 analyzed and explicated convincingly

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through psychoanalysis26) have a structuring presence in the writings and ideas of Marathi speaking intellectuals. But the Marathi intellectuals also carefully define romantic and poetic “expression”—the aspect that exceeds the text—more systematically (and elegantly) than their romantic and post-utilitarian brethren (such as William Jones, Hegel, and John Stuart Mill back in Europe), and are more adroit with their use of theory. Theory becomes the “re-gift” to Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, as I discuss towards the end of this section and chapter.27 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 their own work. In general, Chiplunkar was one of the first to suggest that Marathi as a language and literature was worthy of study at all, and 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 was great but misdirected towards the wrong god.28 Instead, Chiplunkar identified the importance of the Marathi śāhīrs, and placed them within a global romantic discourse that becomes a point of departure for “volkishness” and other fasci-nationalistic discourses by the 1920s.29 There was only a small coterie of intellectuals when Chiplunkar began writing, only a few interlocutors in Pune—Dadoba Pandurang Tarkhadkar (Dādobā Pāṇḍuranga Tarkhaḍkara), Mahadev Moreshwar Kunte (Mahādeva Moreśvara Kunṭe), and Kashinath Balkrushna Marathe (Kāśinātha Bālakṛṣṇa Marāṭhe)—none of whom zeroed in on the problem of literature in the same way as Chiplunkar.30 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.31 A “shastri” by lineage and by claim, rather than “Master of Arts,” Chiplunkar was an insider in all the significant ways. Krishna Shashtri (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, Krishna Shashtri was appointed to the literary Dakshina Prize Committee, and in 1865 he became the principal of Pune Training College.32 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, and especially Marathi poetic literature, and began his comparative studies.33 During his time there, the son helped his father with the magazine Shālāpatrak, or School Newsletter, wherein Vishnu Shastri

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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.34 “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 nineteenth-century literary studies, and our own scholarly moment. In revisiting Chiplunkar’s essay, I attempt move beyond isolationist literary histories so I may chart the mutations and genealogies of gifting and regifting across spans of space and time. Chiplunkar frames his more general introduction around tropes that resonate with romantic movements globally, and there is no mistaking these tropes, even in translation. We find a healthy admixture of German romanticism, with thematic tidbits of Herder, Kant, and also Hegel making appearances in his writing. But if one reads only for those moments, then one may also overlook the more Sanskritik moments of Chiplunkar’s ideas about poetry, moments in which European romanticisms, partially having been founded on William Jones’ thought, reconnoiter with currents in Sanskrit aesthetics. It is this process, of gifting, receiving, rearticulating, and re-gifting that forms the basis of this section, with a bi-and-multi directional flow of ideas between colonized and colonizers. In the essay, he writes: koṇtyāhī rāṣṭrāta pāhū gele astān ase āḍhaḷate kī, te rāṣṭra sadñāna daśesa yeū lāgale mhanje tyāce vicāra kavitā rūpāne pahilyāne bāhera nighū lāgatāta. tī kavitā pahilyāne lāvaṇyāsārakhyā vṛttāt asate, kāraṇ taśyā kālacyā uddāma kavitodgārasa taśīca vṛtte atyanta anukūḷa asatāta. Tyāt bahuta karūna vīrancī adbhuta kṛtye, va tyāncī caritre hīca varṇilelī asatāta.35 Having observed any nation, one realizes that once that nation begins to come into knowledge [rāṣṭra sadñāna daśesa yeū lāgale], then it firstly utters its thoughts in the form of poetry. That poetry is firstly with qualities akin to a lāvaṇī [lāvaṇyāsārakhyā vṛttāt], because those qualities are most appropriate [atyanta anukūḷa] for the turbulent poetic utterances of that time. For the most part it contains marvelous deeds of heroes [vīrancī adbhuta kṛtye] and descriptions of their lives.

Following this, Chiplunkar briefly mentions Homer, and also English and Scottish Ballads. His omission of the Mahabharata and Ramayana 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: Āpalyā deśāta tarī peśvyāncyā kārakīrdīta hoūna gelelyā vikhyāta puruṣānvara kelelyā jyā lāvaṇyā kinvā povāḍe āpaṇa aikato teca vāstavika pāhatā marāṭhī bhāṣecī ādya kavitā hota. kāraṇ vāmana paṇdita, moropanta, vagaire kavīnnī jarī marāṭhī bhāṣeta āpalī

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kavitā lihilī, tarī tī sanskṛta bhāṣecyāca kevaḷa dhāṭaṇīvara aslyāmuḷe tīsa marāṭhī kavitā mhaṇaṇyāpekśā sanskṛta kavitece rūpantara mhaṇaṇe he vājavī āhe.36 Even in our nation, the lāvaṇīs or povāḍās that we hear about renowned men from the past who were in the Peśvās 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 on 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 (paṇḍita-kavis) Vaman, and Moropant37 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 non-classical Indian languages. (Perhaps he seeks a secular historical consciousness situated in empty homogeneous time, rather than the kinds of ontologies in which bhakti poetry operates, perhaps bhakti is for the poor and non-Brahmins? —but these are my speculations.) Slowly, even though poetry retains some of its masculine (mārdavādī) characteristics, it loses some of its splendor, the main reason because: sṛṣṭītīla sundara kinvā bhavya padārthāncā, va sansārātīla nānā prakārcyā prasangī hṛdayāsa jyā vikāra hotāta, tyāncā ādhīcyā kavīnvara jitakā ṭhasā uṭhalelā asato titakā puḍhacyā kavīnvara nasato, va tyāmuḷe pahilyāsa tyā goṣṭīnce jase hubehuba varṇana karatā yete tase puḍhalyāsa yeta nāhī…sarva rāṣṭrāta agadī junāta kavica sarvotkṛṣṭa asatāta…pahilyānnī manovikārāce udbhāvana vagaire jase agadī sahaja rītyā kele asate tase puḍhalyāsa…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 colorful 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 [udbhāvana] a mental transformation, so effortlessly fashioned [sahaja 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, 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

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immaturity38—and how those nations first express their thoughts through poetry. The poetry of such nations consists, firstly, of lyric poetry which he implicitly equates with lāvaṇī (and as I mentioned above, there’s more than a little work to be done on historical poetics here). And these lyrics have a proclivity for turbulent (uddāma) affects (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 (kavītodgāra). (Of course, Chiplunkar is at least partially mistaken in these assumptions, as I mentioned above, but it is important to sustain 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 mold—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 occurrences (sṛṣṭītīla sundara kinvā bhavya padārtha). The echo of Burkean-Kantian language is difficult to ignore.39 The first poets are unique because they have a qualitatively different relationship to poetry’s beautiful and sublime materials. More precisely, these materials have been impressed to a greater extent on the earlier poets 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 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.

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 on 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 buddhīśivāya dusare kāhīca sādhana nasalyāmuḷe tyānce sarva vicāra kevaḷa manḥpreritaca asatāta…[dusaryānnā] pahilyānnī kelelyā kāvyāncā ādhāra asato…”40 That is, the earlier poetry is experiential, whereas later poetry is purportedly discursive. Perhaps we may further add that the earliest poets are worldly, laukika, whereas later ones benefit from the circulation of earlier poetry. Comments like these also underline the differences between something

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like vāṅmaya as opposed to sāhitya. The former is immanently situated whereas the latter departs and is dislocated, the latter is an object designed to circulate. 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. That is, not all of Chiplunkar’s thought is romantic. Chiplunkar’s use of buddhī and manḥ, and his repeated use of various forms of rasa (he often describes the rasīka, or “taster”) transform the terms of discourse from one imported with German romantic and Jonesian “expressive” legacies, into one situated within a mature, rooted, Indian philosophical and poetic-aesthetic epistemology. 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 svābhāvika udgāra). Without wordy and purely formal poetic techniques/formalisms (alaṃkāra), “this kind of poetry is very captivating for its simple and pure form”: “tice sādhe śuddha svarūpa tyā veḷesa phāraca ramaṇīya disate.”41 That is, the most important qualities in poetry are the non-formalist moments, especially when it expresses deeply but still 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 (hṛdayadrāvaka) 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-audience (sahṛdaya; literally “true-hearted”) and the sahṛdaya’s place within this system, especially in insuring poetry remains expressive, rather than degenerately formal. Most importantly, Chiplunkar’s usage of terminologies such as poetic devices or techniques (alaṃkāra), 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. Its vector leads to the unsteady realm of the implicit, the meaning beyond the surface that is not contained in language’s grammar; it is always a provocation in the world to be something other and more than it is.

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Chiplunkar’s romantic expressivity thus becomes both relevant for Romanticism’s broadly global genealogies, given that “expressivity” is seen as a link, via William Jones, to Hegel.42 But it also goes beyond such genealogies: Chiplunkar’s 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 eleventh 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.’”43 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. An opinion piece in the Mahratta newspaper 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,” thus tangentially giving us entry into curricular debates.44 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. Chiplunkar follows the prompts from the Kāvyaprakāśa interpretively, in which Mammaṭa also categorizes poetry along three distinct lines, the first in which a suggested meaning (dhvanī; lit. “sound”) dominates the expression, a second in which the suggested expression doesn’t dominate, and a third, which is non-suggestive and contains purely fanciful words, devices, and expressions.45 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, generally, as something beyond the mechanical operations of a given poem, positioned at the top of a tripartite hierarchy, following by an admixture of expression and formalism, with pure formalism relegated to third place. 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.”46 The question that has haunted me, since I was a graduate student, is, what is the philosophical force of the Sanskrit

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grammatical-philosophical-aesthetic nexus on thought more globally during the nineteenth century? Such a question is salient for multiple reasons—the immediate one being about the collection and export of Sanskrit learning and manuscripts— but another pertinent one about the way works such as Rangarajan’s, that offer interesting theoretical language further erase Indian intellectual traditions in the name of critiquing figures such as Jones, Müller, Monier-Williams, the Mills, etc. How are we to answer her theory rich, but sources poor, book? If indeed her book is about an economy, about giving, receiving, and giving again, then why are there so few non-hegemonic actors in her book, from whom the regift was received and forgotten? Indeed, 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 persons who gifted knowledge to colonizers in the first place.47 And this process, of dismissing the expert “native” was quite ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, implicating Rangarajan in a well-worn colonial practice. For example, colonial officials loved to import trained animals from India, especially camels, asses, and elephants, but loathed their native trainers without whom training could not be reproduced elsewhere.48 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.49 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. It is important to note that Chiplunkar’s position barely scratches the Kāvyaprakāśa’s surface. Perhaps it does not even get that far—it is in the first few pages of a translation that is over 450 pages long. These are 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. This is obviously not the place to address all of these issues—indeed they are largely beyond my competence.50 And yet a few illuminating moments do speak to the ways in which, 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. Perhaps the most conspicuous moments where we may recall some familiar theoretical language comes a little bit later in the Kāvyaprakāśa, where the

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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.]”51 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 in fact, Saussure was himself a student of Sanskrit, having published and written about the Genitive Absolute construction, in which a writer may utilize 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.52 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. Buddhists were unconvinced, unlike brahmans, that words recited properly refer to the things themselves. Words referring to the things themselves was 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 further how Dignaga (c. 480- c. 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.”53

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. 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 twentieth century, then

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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! In this light, Saussure, and Austin after him, are hardly the original thinkers they are made out to be, and make sense only within the context of this long, often submerged, engagement with Sanskrit linguistics. 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 mis-readings—or unacknowledged thefts (in Jack Goody’s words), especially on the part of European “scholars”—of Sanskrit texts and linguistics more broadly.54 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 as Franz Bopp, the aforementioned Whitney and Saussure, Emile Benveniste, Leonard Bloomfield, and Noam Chomsky actively utilizing this tradition of thought in their own work.55 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, or Trautmann and Baxter in their work on phonology and morphology.56 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. Such subtler exchanges, I hope, will be the topic of a more complete world-making literary-historical study.

Worlds, Again, Finally I began this essay with the problematic of the Marathi śāhīr, through whom “literature,” conceptually, was defined, and the way the Marathi language has no conceptual equivalent to “literature.” Rather, literature was (and perhaps still is) of two kinds: vāṅmaya and sāhitya. The one connected, rooted, and transformative; the other an object that may circulate outside its station without much hassle, functioning along the dyad of reality and representation. The śāhīrs, their experiential

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knowledge, absorbing and recasting their observations, was the basis of a worldly definition of literature, one in 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: vāṅmaya. By contrast, sāhitya was a relatively new term, whose prominence rose as the nineteenth century advanced, utilized precisely to accommodate that which could not be encompassed by a strict definition of vāṅmaya, whose all-too-concrete audience meant that vāṅmaya’s circulation was far more limited than a text within discourse. Most importantly, these distinctions are reminiscent of the conceptual outlines of world literature and world-global history in our current zeitgeist, as Bose mentions in his introduction, and Manning in his preface. Returning to vāṅmaya, 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, 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 that remains after one has accounted for the literal. But Chiplunkar gave it a founding grammar and theory that is fundamental for twentieth-century linguistics. The connection between vāṅmaya and laukiktā, or worldliness is precisely about an 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. 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.57 It is easy to piggy back on contemporary scholarship, whether to construct or deconstruct. And I believe one may be tempted to use such 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.58 (Amusingly enough—Pavel acknowledges the impact of Chomsky’s grammar, and implicitly, the long legacy of Sanskrit, on his own early work!) But to use them reinscribes the history of erasure that has accompanied a perceived belatedness of theory, modernity, and other such concepts from 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.”59 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

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German tradition, borrowing from others and giving to them too. As we have seen in this chapter, Chiplunkar and his contemporary pandits are and have been part of this world, even instrumental in worlding it, perhaps even more so than Cheah’s interlocutors: where would Saussure be without Sanskrit, where would twentieth-­ century theory be without Saussure?

Notes 1

P. Cheah, “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature,” New Literary History 45, 3 (2014): 303–329; D. Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel As Global Form. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

2

In addition to the aforementioned Cheah and Ganguly, some older scholarship includes: T. G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, cop. 1986 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); R. Ronen, Possible worlds in literary theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

3

G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, The Social Foundations of Aesthetic Forms Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); V. W. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); M. Allan, In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

4

Mufti, among others, speaks about how orientalism, as a discourse, framed colonialism as a “gift” to the colonized, I take up his cue in this chapter as well as chapter 4 about Shakuntala. For his most concise statement on the outlines of this discourse, see A. R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 110. For “regifting” see P. Rangarajan, Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 121–30.

5

Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, 129.

6

See P. Cheah, What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Cheah, “World against Globe.”

7

S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 83.

8

C. Novetzke, “Note to Self: What Marathi Kirtankars’ Notebooks Suggest about Literacy, Performance, and the Travelling Performer in Pre-Colonial Maharashtra,” in F. Orsini and K. Butler Schofield, eds., Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India (Marseille: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 179.

9

R. O’Hanlon, “Performance in a World of Paper: Puranic Histories and Social Communication in Early Modern India,” Past & Present 219, 1 (May 1, 2013): 87–126.

10

J. T. Molesworth, A Dictionary : Maráthı ́ and English, 2d ed., rev. enl. (Bombay: Printed for Government at the Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1857), 499.

11

S. G. Tulpule and A. Feldhaus, “A Dictionary of Old Marathi.,” Dictionary (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1999), 746, http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/tulpule/.

12 13

Molesworth, A Dictionary, 499. K. Krishnamoorthy, “The Meaning of ‘Sahitya’: A Study in Semantics,” Indian Literature 28, 1 (105) (1985): 66–67.

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14

P. Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960, Cultures of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 122, 244n.98.

15

D. Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Translation/Transnation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 281.

16

Ya. Na Keḷakara, Aitihāsika povāḍe: Marāṭhyāñcā kāvyamaya itihāsa (Puṇe: Ḍāyamaṇḍa Pablikeśansa, 2008); Y. N. Kelkar, Marathi sahira ani sahiri vanmaya (Pune: Pune University Press, 1974); Ya. Na Keḷakara, Tantakavi tathā śāhīra (Puṇe: Di Ṭīcarsa Āyaḍiyala Pabliśiṅga Hāusa Li., 1952).

17

Deshpande, Creative Pasts, 57.

18

K. A. Kulkarni, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2022), See especially chapter 3.

19

R. Walkowicz, Born Translated: the Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

20

The most concise statement of expressivity and romanticism can be found in: W. 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 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772), 201–17.

21

The few people who have chiseled away and captured various aspects of Marathi language politics, but not so much the romantic elements, are: E. E. McDonald, “The Modernizing of Communication: Vernacular Publishing in Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra,” Asian Survey 8, 7 (July 1, 1968): 589–606; E. E. McDonald, “The Growth of Regional Consciousness in Maharashtra,” Indian Economic & Social History Review 5, 3 (September 1, 1968): 223–43; V. Naregal, Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002). In an otherwise compelling and complex book, Prachi Deshpande’s Creative Pasts (2007), for example, doesn’t even have an entry for romanticism in its index, even though nineteenth-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 L. Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Contemporary Indian Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 19.

22

S. Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 4.

23

P. Casanova, The world republic of letters, trans. M. B DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 77–79. Indian intellectuals had obviously read German romanticism, but do not mention names of specific persons like Herder.

24

E. Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age, Under the Sign of Nature (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 6–7, 28.

25

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 P. Gurjarpadhye, Bringing Modernity Home: Marathi Literary Theory in the Nineteenth Century (along with an Anthology) (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2014), 232.

26

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 and jealous feeling towards others who have that thing, and are enjoying it: see I. Duncan, “Spawn of Ossian,” in E. Gottlieb, ed., Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760-1820 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 3–18.

27

I refer, of course, to John Stuart Mill’s 1833 “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,” in J. Stuart Mill, J. M. M. Robson, and J. Stillinger, Autobiography and Literary Essays (Toronto: University of Toronto

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Press, 1981), 343–65. See also Kulkarni, World Literature and the Question of Genre, Chapter 1, especially, contains more details about Romantic poetry, Wordsworth, and Chiplunkar. 28

V. K. Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, ed. Shrinivas Narayan Banhatti (Puṇe: Suvicāra Prakāśana Maṇḍaḷa, 1939), 71–84.

29

B. Zachariah, “Global Fascisms and the Volk: The Framing of Narratives and the Crossing of Lines,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, 4 (October 2, 2015): 608–12, https://doi.org/10.1080/0 0856401.2015.1080404; B. Zachariah, “At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, 4 (October 2, 2015): 639–55, https://doi.org/10.1080/00 856401.2015.1078948. There is little work on the connections between volkisch romanticisms that goes into work by nineteenth-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: R. D. Nicholson, “Corporeality, Aryanism, Race: The Theatre and Social Reform of the Parsis of Western India,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, 4 (October 2, 2015): 613–38, 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: Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2004), 40n.8, 60.

30

For the broad outlines, see Gurjarpadhye, Bringing Modernity Home, 55–132.

31

Gurjarpadhye, Bringing Modernity Home, 58–60. Chiplunkar is seen as one of the most important writers of the period, whose work inflected the direction of the Marathi world of letters. See A. N. Deshpande, Ādhunika Marāṭhī Vāṅmayācā Itihāsa (Pune: Vhinasa Prakāśana, 1967).

32

Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, Indian Worthies (Bombay: Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, 1906), 121–22.

33

Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, 126–31.

34

Keḷakara, Aitihāsika povāḍe, 1.

35

Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 5.

36

Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 5.

37

Vāman Paṇdit (1608-1695) and Moropant (1729-1794) were upper-caste, highly trained “paṇdit kavis” from the 17th and 18th centuries.

38

I. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment,” Translated by M. C. Smith, http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/ CCREAD/etscc/kant.html, accessed July 14, 2018.

39

E. 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); I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. Nicholas Walker, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

40

Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 6. It is unclear exactly what 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 individual’s experiential life…” see S. Hamilton, Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 114–16.

41

Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇupadī, 7.

42

J. D. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 109. For William Jones’s theory specifically, see Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, 201–17.

43

S. Pollock, A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 224.

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44

K. T. T., “The Sanskrit Chair,” The Mahratta, December 18, 1881, Sunday edition, 1. Naturally, there is more to unpack here, which do elsewhere.

45

A. Mammata, KavyaPrakash of Mammata, trans. Ganganatha Jha (Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1966), 6–7, http://archive.org/details/KavyaPrakash.

46

Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, 129.

47

Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, 117.

48

P. Sohoni, “Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration: Animals and Human Knowledge,” Transfers Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 8, 1 (2018): 1–14.

49

S. G. Alter, William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

50

For a list of topics, see Mammata, KavyaPrakash of Mammata, 22–37.

51

Mammata, KavyaPrakash of Mammata, 17–18. Tom Tillemans seems to think that Saussure was not aware of the double-negative, 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 E. N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2017 Edition (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/dharmakiirti/.

52

See F. de Saussure, De l’emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit (Genève : Impr. J. G. Fick, 1881), http:// archive.org/details/delemploidugni00sausuoft.

53

J. Bronkhorst, A Sabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 67–68.

54

J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

55

Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, 164.

56

V. Dharwadker, “Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyashāstra, Darwin, and Affect Theory,” PMLA 130, 5 (October 1, 2015): 1381–1404; T. 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; W. 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.

57

Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 77–85.

58

Cheah, What Is a World?, 4; Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 77–85.

59

Cheah, What Is a World?, 12.

Works Cited Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Alter, Stephen G. William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language. Baltimore, MD: London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Baxter, William H. “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. Bronkhorst, Johannes. A Sabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Cheah, Pheng. “World against Globe: Toward a Normative Conception of World Literature.” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 303–329. ———. What Is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Cipaḷūṇakara, Vishṇu Kr̥shṇa. Vishṇupadī. Edited by Shrinivas Narayan Banhatti. Puṇe: Suvicāra Prakāśana Maṇḍaḷa, 1939. Culler, Jonathan D. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Translation/Transnation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Deshpande, Achyut Narayan. Ādhunika Marāṭhī Vāṅmayācā Itihāsa. Pune: Vhinasa Prakāśana, 1967. Deshpande, Prachi. Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960. Cultures of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Dharwadker, Vinay. “Emotion in Motion: The Nāṭyashāstra, Darwin, and Affect Theory.” PMLA 130, 5 (October 1, 2015): 1381–1404. Duncan, Ian. “Spawn of Ossian.” In Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 17601820, edited by Evan Gottlieb, 3–18. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Gidal, Eric. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. Under the Sign of Nature. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Goody, Jack. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Gurjarpadhye, Prachi. Bringing Modernity Home: Marathi Literary Theory in the Nineteenth Century (along with an Anthology). Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2014. Hamilton, Sue. Indian Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jackson, Virginia Walker. Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Jones, William. 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. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “What Is Enlightenment.” Translated by M. C. Smith. http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/ CCREAD/etscc/kant.html, accessed July 14, 2018. Keḷakara, Ya. Na. Tantakavi tathā śāhīra. Puṇe: Di Ṭīcarsa Āyaḍiyala Pabliśiṅga Hāusa Li., 1952. ———. Aitihāsika povāḍe: Marāṭhyāñcā kāvyamaya itihāsa. Puṇe: Ḍāyamaṇḍa Pablikeśansa, 2008. Kelkar, Yeshwant Narsinha. Marathi sahira ani sahiri vanmaya. Pune: Pune University Press, 1974. Krishnamoorthy, K. “The Meaning of ‘Sahitya’: A Study in Semantics.” Indian Literature 28, 1 (105) (1985): 65–70. K. T. T. “The Sanskrit Chair.” The Mahratta. December 18, 1881, Sunday edition. Kulkarni, Kedar A. “Between the Raj and Raja: Taking Śakuntalā on Tour in Colonial India.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 44, 1 (December 10, 2017): 92–116. ———. World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India, 1790-1890. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Mammata, Acharya. KavyaPrakash of Mammata. Translated by Ganganatha Jha. Varanasi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1966. http://archive.org/details/KavyaPrakash.

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Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali. Indian Worthies. Bombay: Manoranjak Grantha Prasarak Mandali, 1906. McDonald, Ellen E. “The Growth of Regional Consciousness in Maharashtra.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 5, 3 (September 1, 1968): 223–43. ———. “The Modernizing of Communication: Vernacular Publishing in Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra.” Asian Survey 8, 7 (July 1, 1968): 589–606. Mill, John Stuart, J. M. M. Robson, and Jack Stillinger. Autobiography and Literary Essays. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Mitchell, Lisa. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Contemporary Indian Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009. Molesworth, James Thomas. A Dictionary : Maráthı ́ and English. 2d ed., rev. enl. Bombay: Printed for Government at the Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1857. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Naregal, Veena. Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere : Western India under Colonialism. London: Anthem Press, 2002. Nicholson, Rashna Darius. “Corporeality, Aryanism, Race: The Theatre and Social Reform of the Parsis of Western India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, 4 (October 2, 2015): 613–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1080211. Novetzke, Christian. “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, edited by Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield (169–184). Marseille: Open Book Publishers, 2015. O’Hanlon, Rosalind. “Performance in a World of Paper: Puranic Histories and Social Communication in Early Modern India.” Past & Present 219, 1 (May 1, 2013): 87–126. Pavel, Thomas G. Fictional Worlds. Cop. 1986. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. ———. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Ramaswamy, Sumathi. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Rangarajan, Padma. Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Ronen, Ruth. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Saussure, Ferdinand de. De l’emploi du génitif absolu en sanscrit. Genève : Impr. J. G. Fick, 1881. http:// archive.org/details/delemploidugni00sausuoft. Sohoni, Pushkar. “Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration: Animals and Human Knowledge.” Transfers Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 8, 1 (2018): 1–14. Tillemans, Tom. “Dharmakīrti.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2017/entries/dharmakiirti/. Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2004. ———. “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. Tulpule, Shankar Gopal, and Anne Feldhaus. “A Dictionary of Old Marathi.” Dictionary. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1999. http://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/tulpule/.

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Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Walkowicz, Rebecca. Born Translated: the Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Zachariah, Benjamin. “Global Fascisms and the Volk: The Framing of Narratives and the Crossing of Lines.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, 4 (October 2, 2015): 608–612. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00856401.2015.1080404. ———. “At the Fuzzy Edges of Fascism: Framing the Volk in India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 38, 4 (October 2, 2015): 639–655. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2015.1078948.

CHAPTER 5

Violence, Indenture and Capitalist Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies Nandini Dhar

Abstract Much recent literary criticism, predicated upon a binary opposition between the “past” and the “present”, prevents us from critically understanding a crucial group of literary texts which have emerged in the early twentieth century in Indian Anglophone literature. Realism remains, in Indian literature, a persistent presence, in spite of its many critiques, and it operates in far more complex ways than an unilinear documentation of the troubled present. Within novels that often move between the past and the present in metafictional forms, one may include Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) and Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans (2015). In this essay, I am specifically concerned with how, in Amitav Ghosh’s critically-acclaimed Sea of Poppies (2008), the social realist novels of the Indian regional languages of the 1930s and 1940s, constitute a significant metafictional presence, demonstrating a central element of the aesthetic politics of the “realist impulse” of the Indian novels in the contemporary era. I argue such novels form a significant element of Ghosh’s metafictional archives precisely because they enable him to grapple with certain contradictions of world-historical dimensions. Such contradictions necessarily involve a deeper look into the complex lived and structural histories of capitalism’s emergence and development in the sub-continent. But, they also constitute the possibility of resistances that the violences of capital necessarily engender, and the challenges of narrativizing the interlocked materialities of capital’s violences and anti-capitalist resistances in and through novelistic forms.

Keywords: Amitav Ghosh; Capitalism; Indentured Labor; Realism; Postcolonialism

In her essay “The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality”, literary critic Ulka Anjaria writes of the emergence of a new trend in contemporary Indian writing. She terms such a trend “realist impulse.”1 The “realist impulse”, Anjaria comments, “is a transition in representational mode, and/or medium that entails a new textual engagement with the contemporary world, as evident in gestures such as stories set in the present rather than the past and the trimming of modernist, metaphorical and metafictional language for a more stripped-down and less ostensibly self-conscious aesthetic. The impulse signals a new political urgency in

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both nonfiction and fiction writing alike.”2 While I agree with much of Anjaria’s observations about the emergence of such a new literary trend in the last decade or so, I also argue, Anjaria’s approach to issues of time in contemporary Indian English fiction, which predicates itself upon a relatively simple binary opposition between the “past” and the “present”, prevents us from critically understanding a crucial group of literary texts which have emerged during this period in India, and in which what Anjaria terms as “realist impulse”, is enacted not only through a retrospective look at the past, but through a metafictional examination of the past realist novels. In other words, in such contemporary novels, the very notion of the “realist impulse” appears as a diachronic, rather than as a synchronic entity, locating the concerned body of realist novels in India within a longue durée. Such an attempt, then, leads us to the essential recognition that realism remains, in Indian literature, a persistent presence, in spite of its many critiques, and it operates in far more complex ways than an unilinear documentation of the troubled present. Within such novels, that often move between the past and the present in metafictional forms, one can include Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy, Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) and Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans (2015). In this essay, I am more specifically concerned with how, in Amitav Ghosh’s critically-acclaimed Sea of Poppies (2008), the social realist novels of the Indian regional languages of the 1930s and 1940s, constitute a significant metafictional presence, demonstrating what Anjaria herself claims to be a central element of the aesthetic politics of the “realist impulse” of the Indian novels in the contemporary era. I argue, such novels form a significant element of Ghosh’s metafictional archives precisely because they enable him to grapple with certain political phenomenon and contradictions of world-historical dimensions. Such phenomenon and contradictions necessarily involve a deeper look into the complex lived and structural histories of capitalism’s emergence and development in the sub-continent. But, they also constitute the possibility of resistances that the violences of capital necessarily endanger, and the challenges of narrativizing the interlocked materialities of capital’s violences and anti-capitalist resistances in and through novelistic forms. In Sea of Poppies, neither such violences, nor the attempts of resistance to such, can be understood through nation-bound social, cultural, political and narrative forms, tied as they are, to the circulation of capital on a global scale. Rather, they bespeak of trans-regional intersections, syntheses and inter-dependencies, making concrete, through the novelistic writing, the otherwise abstract trans-national operations of capital. Critical readings of the novel, therefore, demand a familiarity with social histories with a diverse range of geographical focus, and a multiplicity of literary forms, both of which must encompass divergent temporalities, languages and socio-economic systems, both local and trans-regional. But, what such critical

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readings also demand, is a general awareness on the part of the critic, that capital, in its traffic, forever moves between the abstract and the concrete, the global and the local, the trans-national and the national, thus making the charting of the contradictions between such an imperative. As such, there is nothing novel in the claim that capital creates multiple forms of “interdependencies,” which move beyond national borders. There is also hardly anything novel in the claim, for literary scholars and cultural theorists, that capital’s revamped transnational financial circuits enable traffic in cultural and literary texts, which make a certain notion of “world literature” possible. In fact, these were precisely the claims that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make in The Communist Manifesto in 1848.3Sea of Poppies becomes, in specific ways, a congealed and metafictional archive of such world literary aesthetics, where widely disparate literary forms in circulation brush against each other, creating a complex, panoramic narrative, which demands careful teasing out.4 Yet, to stop there, would be to miss out on the fact that the novel becomes so, through a narrativization of another category, that along with the trans-national circulation of capital, preoccupies Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, and elsewhere. The category happens to be labour, without a consideration of which, the circulation of capital, whether within a specific locality, nation, region or the globe, within the Marxist framework, loses its meaning. However, “labour” as a category, when observed through the interpretative lens of the academic disciplines in circulation, will invoke certain contradictory realities. In history, for example, labour has long been a crucial category of critical enquiry, so much so that one can speak of “labour history” as an important sub-discipline in the field. Labour historians, in the recent years, have noted an increasing “globalization” of the field of labour studies, whereby, as Marcel Van der Linden, a pioneer of the field of what has come to be known as the Global Labour Studies, comments, “This “globalization” in the study of labour history calls for a new type of historiography, one which “overtakes” old-style labour history from North America and Europe by incorporating its findings in a new globally oriented approach.”5 While such a “globally oriented approach” would necessarily involve an understanding of the ramifications of capitalism beyond the shores of the North Atlantic, Linden reminds us, that “in capitalism labour can become a commodity in several ways, that is, not only via wage labour but also through slavery, sharecropping or debt peonage. All these forms of dependent labour rightfully belong to the research spectrum of global history.”6 Seen from such a perspective, Sea of Poppies, written as it is by an anthropologist, lends itself easily to certain social historical readings, as factory-based wage labour, slavery, indenture, peasant-labour and maritime labour come to interact with each other in the novel’s pages in myriad ways, situated as they are within the specific space-time continuum of the early nineteenth-century east India, often leading to unpredictable and unexpected results.

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However, in world literature scholarship, especially that intersect with what has been historically known as “postcolonial studies,” studies of such forms of labour have been scarce. Other than Sonali Perera’s monograph No Country: Working Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (2014),7 the inter-related categories of labour, class relations and class conflicts remain relatively unexplored. Scholarship on Sea of Poppies, thus, too, while focusing on trans-oceanic routes, traffic in and through the sugar colonies, and nineteenth-century globalization, have only referred to the category of labour tangentially.8 However, an attention to the issues of labour in the text, as my subsequent analysis shows, opens up a veritable theoretical reservoir though which one can think of the ways in which “globalized labour” in an interdependent capitalist world can co-exist and intersect in and with multiple forms—including, but not limited to, wage labour, slavery and indenture. Writing of such intersections, then, invariably, also exerts pressure on the received literary forms, a phenomenon to which Sea of Poppies responds through a process of formal geographical and literary synthesis. Such a process can be termed as a form of meta-fictionalization of literary globalities, keeping a specific eye on the transnational circulation of capital, and its inevitable contradictions with forms of labour, which also, in the process, become trans-regional and trans-national. Literary critical Francoise Lionnet has, thus, astutely commented, Sea of Poppies, is a work of “world-forming literature” rather than being world literature.9 As Ghosh’s own critical commentary reveals, writing of such intersections has demanded on his part, deep archival, theoretical and scholarly engagement with social historical and anthropological research.10The novel, thus, becomes, arguably, as much of a work in theoretical innovations and experimentations in public history in global labour history studies in the age of mercantile capitalism, as it is a work of art and creative imagination, demanding that scholars of both world history and world literature, attend to it through a certain form of inter-dependent symbiosis. While beyond the scope of this particular essay, it would not be an exaggeration to say that each one of the seemingly disparate literary genres that forms the metafictional archive of this novel, pertain to a specific form of labour regime.11 In this context, the 1930s and 1940s sub-continental social realist novels—the immediate site of this essay’s analytical purview—provide him with an expansive archive where the messiness of the often intersecting, and contradictory labour-regimes of a semi-feudal system and colonial-capitalist modernity in the region, can be brought under critical scrutiny, put to his immediate narrative service, re-examined, and transformed into important source materials for both the aesthetic and the world-historical work that Sea of Poppies eventually attempts to do. For scholars of both world literature and world history, interested in regimes of labour, and resistances to such, there is, then a larger question here.

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At the outset, Ghosh offers his interlocutors a rich site of scholarly enquiry about the possibility of realism as a globalized genre, whose fictional documentations of emergence and consolidation of capital’s economic and social systems and the contradictions therein, provide complicated commentaries on class, labour, social status, gender and the attending subjectivities. Noteworthy in this context are Ulka Anjaria’s book-length study of realisms in India, titled Realism in the Twentieth Century Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012),12and a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, co-edited by Colleen Lye and Jed Etsy, titled “Peripheral Realisms.”13However, in both of these otherwise seminal works, issues of labour and class remain only tangentially present. Absent also, perhaps as a natural fallout, are the writings of class-conflicts and the complicated subjectivities that they engender. This is precisely one of the crucial areas where Sea of Poppies intervenes. A close textual analysis of the novel demands that we notice, the novel is not merely a structural-sociological delineation of multiple co-existing and intersecting labour regimes. Rather, it is a novel where such structuralism is de-familiarized through meticulous writing of complicated forms of the resistance of the marginalized, invariably encompassing class, but also moving beyond a narrow definition of the latter. Consequently, the novel also demands that we ask, what would scholarly fields of literary and cultural enquiry focusing on the narrativization of class conflicts in the sub-continent look like? What kinds of worldliness would thus be created? And, how would such scholarship influence the existing thrust of the field of the world literary studies? Furthermore, when such work of imaginative writing of class conflicts is done through the form of the historical novel, how can the historians of labour, necessarily interested in globality, but also far more interested in questions of “historical accuracy,” compliment the critical work done by the literary scholars?14Can the project of overriding the received historical archives, in the process of endowing the labourers with complex and allegorical resistential subjectivities and class consciousness in a historical novel—as Ghosh has done—stand in the way of the historian’s work of rebuilding the past predicated upon an analysis of what exists within those very archives? In short, in our simultaneous consideration of the categories of “world literature” and “world history,” can the archive ever be at loggerheads with imagination, and vice versa, especially when the writer is invested in allegorical reading and radicalization of the historical archives, rather than their mere reproduction, as has been done in Ghosh’s novel? To put it simply, then, Sea of Poppies, as a novel offers an astute meditation on the pertinence of the conception of class-struggles that has dominated much of the discussions of liberatory politics throughout the twentieth century. As I show later on in this essay, it does so through the crucial lens of gender. Of course, it is a cliché

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to claim that historical novels are, after all, mediated narrativization of the concerns of the present. Yet, the turn to historical writing in contemporary Anglophone fiction at large, and postcolonial writing specifically, demands critical attention. In terms of Ghosh’s critically-acclaimed novel, scholars such as Eddy Kent and Greg Forter have commented, the novel’s meticulous writing of the nineteenth century opens up ways for us to understand our “current predicament” in a globalized, neoliberal world.15 However, as in most of the scholarship on postcolonial literatures, no attempt as such has been made to link that “predicament” with questions of class and class-conflicts. Neither do their attention to maritime routes and racial ideologies open up their scholarship to complex considerations of how such sites, as maritime regimes and race are implicated in class, and vice versa. It is in this context that Anjaria’s thesis assumes specific importance. To begin with, Anjaria claims, the new realist impulse “thematises the bearer of “bare life” rather than the conflicted subject. It is consequently innovative and experimental rather than naïve and nostalgic.”16 There is an elision here in Anjaria’s analysis. An elision that can also be termed as a form of half-naming. What Anjaria alludes to, through her binary of “bare life” and “conflicted subject”, but never quite names it fully, is the question of class. “Conflicted subject”, in Anjaria’s analysis, comes to stand in for a bourgeois selfhood, especially as it developed in postcolonies such as India, whereas the term “bare life,” in its sheer suggestion of precarity, directs us towards a sub-bourgeois identity, where one’s means of livelihood stands not only upon manual labour, but also in certain contexts, an even more precarious unavailability of such. On the one hand, Anjaria is right. In recent years, there has been a kind of attention to violences of class and poverty in Indian Anglophone fiction in the way it was not quite true before. On the other hand, such a dichotomy runs the danger of a stereotypical, unidimensional sub-bourgeois identity, where complexity and psychic conflict are the provenance of only the rich and middle classes. This essay begins from the critical premise that a close reading of Sea of Poppies, which does embody a distinct “realist impulse” would reveal a much more complicated representation of critical forms of non-bourgeois identity, where conflicted subjectivity and the realities of a “bare life” are enmeshed within each other. For example, a close critical reading of Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies reveals, the construction of such a dichotomy between “bare life” (often narrativized in the novel through the uprooted, famished peasant Deeti’s acceptance of indenture) and being a “conflicted subject” (often narrativized in the novel through the peasant-turned-indentured labourer Deeti’s self-doubts about the arguable benefits of the system) co-exist within the same novelistic matrix, and often within the same individual character’s figuration. The new realist impulse, then, in Sea of Poppies,

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I argue, emerges less from a series of strict and mechanical formal characteristics, but from a more ideological range of concerns, which attempts to understand what Anjaria herself terms as “the unfinished project of capitalist modernity,”17 placing the latter within a longer historical framework, and thus belying a tunnel-vision approach to contemporaneity. Yet, there is an absence of theoretical-political clarity in Anjaria’s very coinage of the phrase “unfinished project of capitalist modernity,” writing as she does in the post-1992 world, where every other form of imagination of economic belonging, other than the capital-centric one, has been pushed to the margins to the point of obliteration. In his much-debated book, The End of History published in 1993, Francis Fukuyama famously claims, “that there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies”18towards “liberal democracy” and “ultimate victory” of capitalism “as the only viable economic system.”19Of course, looking back at this moment in both US and India—the two nations within which Ghosh divides his time—the emergence of right-wing governments, who have ascended to power using the institutions of liberal democracy, yet remain dismissive of the institutional procedures of the latter, demands a thorough problematization of the triumphant undertone of Fukuyama’s thesis. Yet, that the default condition of human existence is to remain centred around capitalist ethos, continued unabated, often also reinforced, rhetorically and philosophically, in multiple and mediated forms, in and through the languages of multiple disciplines—behavioural economics, popular psychology, cultural and literary criticism. In that context, Anjaria’s choice of the phrase—“unfinished project of capitalist modernity”—seems odd, precisely because what is unfinished here is not the work of capitalism itself per se, but the work of anti-capitalist resistance. And, if one has to push that line of thought further, what remains unfinished, terminated and cut short is the work of a socialist modernity. Consequently, it is important to remember that, if 1992 remains in our recent historical memory the year that heralded the triumphalism of Fukuyama and the like, it also heralded the official conclusion of the socialist dream-project, tied as it is to a foundational impulse to re-imagine labour and its quotidian organization. In this essay, I argue, it is the conclusion of that socialist project that operates as one of the crucial ideological sub-texts of the novel. Thus, the “realist impulse” in these novels, can be ascribed to a much more than dualistic binaries between “past” and “present”, between “bare life” and “conflicted subject.” Instead, what propels this novel forward, is a desire to build up an aesthetic-ideological conversation across time. A conversation that acknowledges, in spite of its many critiques and critics, realism might not be an exhausted form, after all.20

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Indenture And Indian Social Realist Novels Elsewhere, I have argued, a thorough combing of the archives of the Indian social realist novels of the 1930s and 1940s would prove, indenture is not necessarily a much-explored theme in such novels.21In fact, one can even claim, there is a clear paucity of the literary representations of the subject in novels that have originated in India. While a more complete exploration of the causes of such an absence is beyond the scope of this essay, I will draw attention to the fact that, indenture does appear for a very, very brief moment in one of the celebrated social realist novels of the era. That novel happens to be the Urdu novelist Munshi Premchand’s Godan (1936). To provide a quick summary of what I have already argued elsewhere, as soon as Gobar, the son of Premchand’s peasant-protagonist Hori, comes back, after his long absence, to his ancestral village, his mother Dhaniya asks him, “Where have you been all this time? Is it right for anyone to run away from home that way? […] Some people said you’d run off to Mauritius.”22 What Dhaniya was afraid of, then, was the possibility of her son becoming an indentured labour. Indenture, thus, remains an unnamed presence in Premchand’s text, named through an invocation of the place it is associated with—Mauritius. It is obvious that the association between Mauritius and indenture would be familiar to the immediate circle of readers Premchand was writing for. Yet, the very prospect of an impoverished peasant leaving the shores of India to find a viable resolution to his life-crises in indenture, is pushed into the margins almost as soon as it is evoked, the placename of Mauritius appearing as only a quick reference, almost unnoticeable—an insignificant detail at best. The word “Mauritius” vanishes from the novel’s world as soon as it has been made known that Gobar had not left for Mauritius after all. For a reader reading the novel primarily from a plot-centric approach, meant to provide “entertainment”, an oversight of this detail would not matter much in terms of understanding the primary narrative thrust of the text. But, Ghosh, as a writer, intervenes precisely at this point where Premchand brushes aside a social-historical phenomenon. In doing so, he posits the indenture to be as much of a central phenomenon to be examined in the history of India’s capitalist development, as are certain other widely acknowledged phenomenon, such as industrialization and urbanization. In the process, Ghosh also establishes himself as an astute, critical and mindful reader of the early twentieth-century realist novel, whose archive forms a crucial element of Sea of Poppies’ metafictional drive. This essay argues, Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies, in many ways, provides a rewriting of Premchand’s celebrated novel Godan. As a novel, Sea of Poppies obviously provides a more detailed exposition of the form of subaltern modernization—the indenture—that appears merely as a brief indirect allusion in Premchand’s novel. But curiously enough, it also explores the site that has been left unexplored in

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Premchand through a more explicitly feminized rewriting of Premchand’s crucial figuration of peasant subjectivity. In doing so, the very site of “peasant subjectivity”, that constitutes an important element of the subcontinental social realisms of the 1930s and 1940s, is brought back within the twenty-first-century Indian Anglophone novel, albeit in a more mediated and metafictional way. This bringing back, I argue, is what that specifically constitutes one of central mores of the “realist impulse” of a novel like Sea of Poppies. This is also precisely the kind of realist impulse that cannot necessarily be understood through the dichotomy that Anjaria sets up. But, instead, the very examination of such a realist impulse demands, that as critics, we engage with the deep ideological resonances of the aesthetic-formal choices Ghosh’s novel makes.

The “Realist Impulse” As A Metafiction in Sea of Poppies and Indian Social Realisms There is something specific about the very thrust of the Indian social realist novels, that makes the genre a productive archive of tropes and figurations for contemporary Indian writers like Ghosh. That specific thrust has been constituted by the fact that the economy has long been one of the central concerns of the social realist fictions written in Indian regional languages. If, as literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee points out in her book, the novel in India was born out of the region’s encounter with colonialism, then realism as a mode of narrative representation arrived in India as an integral element of that same process.23 Later critics point out, beginning in nineteenth century, realism became the preferred form around which much of the colonial literary pedagogy revolved. Anjaria, herself, makes such a claim. As against the pre-colonial aesthetic forms, which were to be deemed to be overtly ornamental, realism was assumed to be the form best suited to represent the emerging modern personhood.24 Needless to say, the novel in India, was also a by-product of the region’s encounter with capitalism. Social realism in India, consequently, could not avoid the centrality of economy in facilitating widespread changes within the social environments of the “nation,” during the very moment it took root in the cultural imaginary as an indigenous Indian form. Throughout the period from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, the social realist fiction in India, in languages such as Hindi, Urdu and Bangla, painstakingly documented and tried to understand the mechanisms through which colonial capitalism conquered pre-existing socio-economic forms in South Asia. Social realist novels became the form which devised a language to narrate this transition from an essentially feudal land tenure system to a complicated and contradictory capitalism, whose relationship with feudalism would forever remain tenuous.

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Consequently, almost since the moment of its inception, the Indian social realist novel had to devise formal mechanisms and narrative strategies through which to represent the peasantry in meticulous terms. Writing about the centrality of credit in the formation of the Anglo-American realist novels, literary critic Annie McClanahan writes, “[…] the emergence of modern credit markets enabled the development of the realist novel. In the nineteenth century, likewise, literature responded to the expansion of finance by asserting its own figurative economies.”25 The “figurative economy” of the Indian social realist novel, often centered on the body of the peasant. In its most typical form, these novels documented the colonial destruction of the Indian peasantry, thus enacting a very specific colonial form of what McClanahan terms as the “expansion of finance.” In order to do so, Indian social realism, from almost the very moment of its inception, was concerned with two things: social hierarchies and the ownership of property, especially as it pertains to the land-tenure system. Ghosh’s novel takes precisely the issue of the peasantry and the land-tenure system as one of its central points of departure. Literary critic, Satya Mohanty, in his attempt to explain the pivotality of such themes in these novels, writes, Indian social realism is “complex and sophisticated, not simply mimetic; the novel seeks to analyze and explain social reality instead of merely holding up a mirror to it.”26 Mohanty calls this “analytical realism”—the realism which “explains and delves into underlying causes.”27 Sea of Poppies not only retains this essential analytical quality of Indian social realism, resists the mimetic sensationalism of a certain kind of literary realisms, but also transforms the techniques and concerns of realism into metafictional elements of his novel, letting the analyticism interact with the ideological-aestheitc underpinnings of the literary forms that do not enjoy any vernacular status in South Asia (like “slave-narratives” and “neo-slave narratives”). Elsewhere, I have argued, Sea of Poppies is a meta-textual hybridization of multiple literary forms— the American seafaring novel, the African-American slave narrative, the Indian diasporic indenture novel, the immigration narrative of the post-1965 Indian diaspora and the Victorian social realist narratives.28In this essay, what I would like to foreground is the fact that, in its attempts to transform Indian social realist narrative into a site of metafictional interventions, Sea of Poppies intervenes in the very aesthetic-ideological construction of the figure which forms the cornerstone of the Indian social realist fiction: the peasant-hero. In these novels, the peasant often appears as a kind of national allegory, a figure whose destruction comes to symbolize the destruction of the pre-colonial Indian economy and by default, the nation. A classic case in point, of course, is the 1936 Hindi novel Godan (Gift of A Cow) by Munshi Premchand, to which I have already made a reference in the preceding section of this essay. The protagonist of the novel, Hori, is a middle-aged peasant who, although somewhat cognizant of the class hierarchies which make up his world, does not know how to challenge them.

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In contrast to his son Gobar, who goes to the nearby town to work in a mill and eventually becomes a trade-union activist, Hori does not find his redemption in the language of class-struggle. Instead, he tries to stick to the feudal code of conduct set for the “ideal peasant”, fails and eventually dies, reeling under the pressure of impoverishment, debt and failure to pay the rents for the small plot of land he owns. Within Premchand’s novel, Hori occupies an ambiguous position. On the one hand, in embodying the destructions wrought by the colonial system in India, he becomes the metaphor of the “motherland” drained of her vitality by the colonial system. On the other hand, for the “progressive” social realist writer, like Premchand, who is writing against the indigenous feudal economy as well as against a colonial modernity, the extinction of the peasant, who represents the last vestiges of the feudal social structure, is almost inevitable.29 Hori’s death, with which the novel concludes, can only be prevented then by migrating to the towns and cities to become mill or factory-workers, as does Gobar, Hori’s son. There is, then, in Premchand’s novel, an embedded theme of the proletarianization of the peasant. This proletarianization also opens up the path for Gobar’s induction into the trade-union—i.e. the path of a rights-based class-struggle. For Premchand, then, the interrelated phenomenon of urbanization and proletarianization of the Indian peasant also leads to the latter’s insertion into the classic Marxist path of class-struggle, which, then, becomes a pivotal element of his self-subjectivity. Proletarianization and the acquisition of a radical class subjectivity, thus, for a writer like Premchand, committed to a “progressive” politics and aesthetic agenda, often come to symbolize the interrelated processes of modernization. This is a narrative of modernization that differs considerably, however, from the more hegemonic varieties of nationalist modernizations, with which these novels were temporally co-terminous. In fact, one can even argue, in their incessant and insistent writing of the class-conflicts through which the landless peasant modernized himself, such social realist writers were, in fact, drawing attention to the fact that the hegemonic Indian nationalisms have failed to induct peasants, workers and other subaltern identities into its symbolic body. Yet, in spite of Premchand’s project to insert the peasant into a modernist subjectivity, that is not quite the hegemonic nationalism, he writes the peasant-subjectivity as necessarily masculine. This is not to suggest that women had no place in his novels. There were “strong” peasant women-characters in many of these novels, including in Premchand’s Godan. Here, Dhaniya, the wife of Hori, is a strong, resourceful woman who possesses her own understanding of the village-economy, which is independent of her husband Hori. She also possesses her own voice within the narrative, and never appears as a silent, submissive stereotype. Indeed, there are even places in the novel where Dhaniya clearly expresses her political and social disagreement with her husband. But from the standpoint of the narrator, she is the peasant-protagonist’s

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wife. Her access to, and inhabitation of the class-identity is primarily mediated by her relationship to her husband. Almost as a natural corollary, then, the women in Premchand’s texts never quite become the subjects of class conflicts. Dhaniya does not. Neither does Gobar’s wife, although she moves in with him to the city. This gendered site of class inhabitation and belonging is one of the most important places where Sea of Poppies intervenes. In contrast to Dhaniya and other women characters in Premchand’s novel, Deeti inhabits her class-position fully. Neither is she insulated from the realities of class-antagonisms. The realities of class-conflict do not produce any gender-neutral space of class belonging for her. Sea of Poppies, therefore, provides a gendered reading of class in a way that Premchand’s novel did not attempt to, and politicizes the very idea of a gendered belonging within a particular class identity. In the process, it also provides a gendered reading of Premchand’s novel in a way that cannot be quite accommodated into Anjaria’s proposed binaries.

Gender And Class Of course, the erasure or neutralization of subaltern femininities formed a constituent element of many Indian nationalisms as early as the nineteenth century. As historian Uma Chakravarti writes in her essay “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?”, nineteenth-century nationalist representations in India had foregrounded the Aryan woman (the progenitor of the upper-caste woman) as the only object of historical concern. It is no wonder then that the Vedic dasi (woman in servitude), captured, subjugated, and enslaved by the conquering Aryans, who also represents one aspect of Indian womanhood, disappeared without leaving any trace of herself in nineteenth-century history.30 Chakravorty’s “vedic dasi” provides the blueprint for the “uneducated”, “vulgar”, “coarse lower-caste” or “lower-class working woman”, who forms the antithesis to the “new woman envisaged by nationalism,” who was, as cultural and literary theorist Tejaswini Niranjana comments, ““modern” but not heedlessly Westernized.”31 In this respect, the social realist novels of the 1930s and 40s provide a space of renegotiation with India’s dominant nationalisms through their representation of Indian subaltern femininities. That is, these novels provide a corrective on the earlier erasure of the subaltern female figures by making them visible, endowing them with narrative significance. At the same time, they neutralize that role by making these women secondary to the male subaltern hero’s quest for survival or a language for dissent. Within Indian historiographic and nationalist representations, therefore, the female indentured laborer has always occupied an even more contradictory place, precisely because, as Niranjana reminds us, “the lower-caste woman would be a central figure in the labor migrations of the nineteenth century.”32 Niranjana goes on:

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“While nationalism provided the language and the spaces in which the middle-class woman could become modern, it also made her a representative—one who spoke for all other Indian women; who became, ‘the transmitter of the fruits of modernization.”33 What prevented the indentured woman from becoming such a “representative figure” was a kind of “double burden.” On the one hand, her class (and often times, caste) identities made her invisible within the nationalist representations. On the other hand, the fact that she left the space of the “nation” altogether, made her, as Niranjana claims, “tangential” to the “project of the future nation.” Historically, even within the classic Indian social realist novels, as I have shown in one of the preceding sections, often tied to the issues of land, the destruction of the peasantry and the feudal relationships, the sites that pertained to indenture, remained absent—invariably. Consequently, complex figurations of the conditions that led to the Indian poor’s acceptance of indenture remains absent from these novels. As do complex figurations of the indentured herself. In contrast to the modernity that comes to the Indian peasant who never leaves the shore of the land, through an essential re-modification of the question of ownership, the ‘modernization’ of the indentured happens within spaces that are inextricably removed from the feudal rootedness to land—the plantation, the barracks, the depots, and last but not the least, the ships. What Sea of Poppies demonstrates, then, a deeper probe into the issues of land and feudal-colonial social relations would also open up other interrelated economic and social sites, which are inextricably linked to a transnational formation—the global plantation complex. In doing so, the novel uses the indenture as a conduit to transnationalize the very issue of the breakdown of the Indian feudal land-tenure system, placing the phenomenon in the context of a global circulation of capital, its myriad social and economic forms, and traffic in and of bodies. In terms of the interstices of class and gender, this opens up a representational crisis. Tenuous as it might be, and resembling nothing like a middle-class domesticity, peasant-women in novels such as Godan could be placed within an overarching socio-cultural realm of domesticity. Dhania, for example, has been represented as exercising a kind of domestic authority, which undercuts the general poverty of her family. Gobar’s wife has been represented as managing his home—poverty-ridden as it is—in the slums of the city. In contrast, it is precisely the “home” that has been snatched away from the indentured woman worker. Sea of Poppies makes that process of loss of home visible to its readers. In doing so, it directs our attention to the fact that the emergence of two kinds of agricultural capitalism that the globe witnessed in nineteenth century—the plantation-based one and the colonial-feudal one—constituted each other’s shadow. The spectre of one was never far from the other. In very specific ways, the spectre of the plantation—located predominantly beyond the shores of India—comes to replace the other site which remains the quintessential form of modernization for the uprooted peasant in novels like that

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of Godan. That site happens to be the factory. Yet, the novel shows, Deeti is no foreigner to the reality of a factory. There is one, and that too—an opium-factory—in her neighboring town of Ghazipur, where her first husband Hukum Singh used to be a worker. The opium factor, thus, appears as a strategic site in the novel, linking Deeti’s life in her arguably insulated village in Bihar, to a global opium economy, and eventually, the world-historical event of the Opium War. In fact, there is a telling passage in the novel where Deeti witnesses the factory for the first time. A close look through the plotting of this particular sequence reveals a crowded constellation of narrative occurrences. For instance, Deeti’s visit to the factory coincides with two other significant transpirations—the collapse of her husband Hukum Singh, who happens to be an acute opium addict, and her witnessing of the indentured migrants being walked to the ship. Earlier, Deeti had also glimpsed an apparition of a ship, which turned out to be Ibis, the “blackbirder” (slave-ship) on which she was finally transported to Mauritius, about the significance of which I have written at length elsewhere.34 Deeti’s visit to the factory, then, has been rendered into an extremely significant and symbolic event, against which several other key events have been juxtaposed, and against which several other events in the novel unfold. Once inside the Ghazipur opium-factory, where Deeti had gone to fetch her ailing husband, she experiences realities markedly different from the scenarios of her everyday life. The factory initially presents itself to her as “bars of light” “shining through slit-like windows that stretched from the floor to the roof.”35 The factory, then, embodies the arrival of Enlightenment in India—literally—and it is represented in the novel as such, as an enlightening vastness. As Deeti progressively penetrates inside the factory, she comes across a rather different reality. While walking through the doorway of the factory, in search of her sick husband, she observes that the factory of Ghazipur is dependent on the “offspring of her field”—the poppies Deeti packs into the earthen vessels during the harvest. She finds in them the imprint of her own labor: Clustered around each set of scales were dozens of earthenware gharas, of exactly the kind she herself used in packing her harvest. How well she knew them, those vessels: they each held one maund of raw opium gum, of a consistency such that a ball of it would stick briefly to your palm if you upended it. Who would guess, in looking at them, how much time and trouble went into the filling of these vessels?36

For the first time, then, Deeti observes how her own labor as a peasant-woman is ultimately intertwined with a larger machinery of capitalist modernity. But as she keeps walking through the factory, she begins to perceive the air as “hot and fetid, like that of a closed kitchen, except that the smell was not of spices and oil, but of liquid opium, mixed with dull stench of sweat.”37 What had initially seemed to

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be a source of overwhelming light has been reduced to the claustrophobic world of the kitchen—a space all too familiar to her. The factory, the cornerstone of capitalist modernity, ironically in being equated to the restricted, feudal world of a rural woman’s kitchen, in the novel, begins to demand a different kind of critical attention. In doing so, the novel also enters upon a complicated conversation with the Indian social realist novels, whereby, the factory space, often exalted in such novels as the harbingers of a cruel, but an essential modernizing force, is feminized, and eventually de-familiarized. One can also see this de-familiarization as a space-clearing gesture, through which the reader is made aware of the fact that the factories are not the only spaces through which one can imagine a trajectory of subaltern modernization in nineteenth-century India. If, to a rural peasant woman, tied deeply to the forms of feudal gendered and domestic forms of oppression, a factory is a reminder of the stench of her own kitchen, then, the former can be hardly looked upon as a form of departure from the feudal norms of repression, as had been the claims of classical Marxisms. Instead of the narrative of an unilinear progression from the field to the factory, the novel, then, proposes a palimpsestic view of the social forms of oppression that characterized Deeti’s life. A palimpsest within which the feudal kitchen and the modern factory system reside within an entangled web of lines and forms. Within the novel, then, Deeti’s perceptions of the interiors of the opium factory is transformed into a conduit for a theoretical argument with the essential political understandings that formed the backbone of the classic Indian realist novels such as Godan. On the other hand, it also sets up the stage for the engagement with the spectre of de-industrialization that is to come soon in the novel as another crucial metafiction. Once inside the factory, Deeti experiences a reek so powerful that she had to pinch her nose to keep herself from gagging. In other words, the interiors of the factory produced in Deeti intense visceral feelings none of which can be described as pleasant in any way. For example, the novel tells us, No sooner had she steadied herself, that her eyes were met by a startling sight—a host of dark, legless torsos was circling around and around, like some enslaved tribe of demons. […] When her eyes had grown more accustomed to the gloom, she discovered the secret of those circling torsos: they were bare-bodied men, sunk waist-deep in tanks of opium, tramping round and round to soften the sludge. Their eyes were vacant, glazed, and yet somehow they managed to keep moving, as slow as ants in honey, tramping, treading.38

The assembly-line, then, comes to embody to Deeti, a form of claustrophobia, made conspicuous in the very imageries of the apparitions. Reminiscent of the meticulous descriptions of the lives of the British working class in Fredriech Engels’ The Conditions of The Working Class In England,39from the very first moment of her

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coming in touch with the institution, Deeti interprets the factory-space as a haunted one, within which, even when she comes to learn of the ultimate consequence of her own labour in the poppy-fields, there is no hope or redemption. In fact, the conjoined metaphor through which she interprets her first glimpse of the assembly-line—an “enslaved tribe of demons”—evokes two significant states of existence that could not be any further from any perceptions of freedom. Those two states happen to be enslavement and the state of a dehumanized demonization. Needless to say, it is precisely in the writing of Deeti’s intuitive, intellectual interiority that the narrator-writer also makes a not-so-tacit reference to the unfree labour regime of chattel slavery, whose shadow never quite leaves the pages of Ghosh’s novel. The supposedly “free” labour of the factory and the coerced labour of the plantation-slavery coalesce in the thoughts of a rural-peasant woman in Bihar, thus bringing together seemingly disparate modes of production. The world, in the pages of Ghosh’s novel, thus, has been noticeably made to shrink. And that shrunken world has been conjoined with each other through modes of unfree labour. There is then no “light” in the new world system, but an overwhelming darkness, which reveals itself to Deeti in an embodied form, as she witnesses for the first time the bodies in motion within the factory assembly-line—dehumanized, machine-like, animal-like. In creating this overwhelming absence of light, where production systems supersede national, geographic and spatial boundaries, Ghosh also creates a complicated intersections between notions of both global history and world literature. Deeti’s observations, here, can be hardly written through the received notions of a single language or national literature. Congealed in this brief passage, then, is, as I have mentioned before in the essay, shadows of multiple genres, originating in a diverse range of geographies, each conspicuously connected to a specific form of labour, often unfree in very different yet similar ways, and inextricably connected to the inner workings of capital. Thus, what also becomes apparent in Ghosh’s novel is the fact that what brings such disparate genres and disparate geographies together, is the new globality created through the intertwined, but often conflicting operations of capital and labour, without a careful consideration of which, no notion of global history can be complete. Furthermore, the factory-space reveals itself to Deeti as a predominantly masculinist space. The novel tells us, Suddenly, Deeti was assailed by the sirdars who supervised the packaging room. What took you so long? … Don’t you know your husband is an afeemkhor? … Why do you send him here to work? … Do you want him to die?

Despite the shocks of the day, Deeti was not of a mind to ignore these attacks. From

the shelter of her sari, she snapped back: And who are you to speak to me like that? How would you earn your living if not for afeemkhors?40

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Of course, in this segment, Deeti comes across as a woman who can stand her ground in front of hostile men. Even as she speaks through her veil, thus performing a kind of ideal feudal, domesticated femininity, she invokes two things—a discourse of proto-indviduality, and a reminder to the male workers that their labour, too, and the wage they derive from it, are implicated within the distress that affects people like her husband. In this, she is much like Premchand’s Dhania—a strong-willed, complex woman who is capable of negotiating her way within and through a complicated web of social relations. Although, one must also remember, in this context, that in Premchand’s novel, Dhania never gets to set her foot in a factory. Neither do other women. One can thus say, in Premchand’s novel, the peasant-woman can have only two kinds of fate. She can remain ensconced within the insularity of a rural-feudal structure, or else, she can manage the male factory-worker’s domesticity at the urban slum. As does Gobar’s wife. Ghosh defamiliarizes that very narrative choice by making Deeti witness a factory-interiority. In doing so, Ghosh urges his readers to ask, if it was at all possible for a woman like Dhania to be completely insulated from the factory-modernity that had emerged in India along with the advent of colonial capitalism. Consequently, the novel provides a critical reading of the 1930s-40s social realist novels, such as Godaan, that created—albeit in a mediated way—a figuration of a peasant-woman whose ultimate identity, remains tied to the domestic. In these novels, obviously, as in Premchand’s Godan, that domestic is hardly the middle-class, bourgeois domesticity. In fact, the realities of the poor women’s lives keep intervening in the novelist’s efforts to create a seamless domestic space for them. Yet, the very representational effort to keep them in the domestic suggests a creation of a mediated class subjectivity for women, where even as they perform labour, they are not granted independent, economic subjectivities as workers or agricultural labourers. Additionally, Sea of Poppies creates a figuration of a factory space that is decidedly masculine, decidedly guided by norms of an aggressive masculinity, within which, the space for a woman like Deeti, is bound to be precarious, even if she shares the same class-identity with the male workers. As a result, within the novel, unlike traditional male peasant heroes, then, Deeti’s path to proletarianization does not follow a linear course. For example, Deeti, in spite of her migration to a town, fails to find any employment for herself—in a factory, or elsewhere—thus communicating a significant failure of Premchand’s modernization narrative. Instead of her induction into the factory system, and by extension into a rights-based model of trade-union activism, Deeti gets induced into the global plantation complex as an indentured labourer, where a notion of rights-based political activism—something akin to the trade-union movement—is impossible.

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Indenture As Capitalist Realism Deeti’s acceptance of indenture, I argue, then performs a symbolic political role in the novel. Ultimately, the indenture becomes the site which comes to replace narratives and materialities of class-conflicts and trade-union mobilization, within which social realist writers like Premchand often located the redemption of their characters and protagonists. In contrast, the only “choice” Sea of Poppies offers Deeti is implication within another institution of production—almost equally repressive, embedded within the structures of colonial capital—and which can only offer her a life suspended between chattel-slavery and wage-slavery. And, that happens to be, the life of an indentured servant. An indentured labor, as I have written elsewhere, is not a peasant, not a chattel slave, nor a factory worker, but an uneasy combination of all three.41 Consequently, the indenture exists within the novel as a signifier of two significant post-1992 historical realities—the collapse of socialism and class-based struggles as a viable alternative to capitalism and the emergence of capital as the only purported global economic, social and cultural reality—often understood in India through the nation’s signing of GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariff). Indenture, then, comes to reside within the novel as an allegory of a precarious, sub-proletariat existence, to which large sections of the globe had been reduced in the post-1992 world, through the twin processes of de-industrialization and intensification of capital’s other violences. In other words, indenture and Deeti’s acceptance of it, comes to operate within the novel as a metafictional marker of what Mark Fisher describes as “capitalist realism”—“the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”42 In other words, at the very heart of the novel’s figuration of Deeti, there is a deep political pessimism. A pessimism that is radically different in its essence from the hopeful future with which classical Indian social realist novels often ended, in spite of their meticulous documentation of the destructions wrought by the colonial capital. In the novel’s metafictional, and mediated writing of this pessimism, there is much that is well-founded. One can, for example, point out towards the failure of the progressive movements in the post-1945 era, both within the global north and the postcolonial societies at large. One can point out towards, for example, the political and economic bankruptcies of the leftist regimes worldwide, which came to power with promises of liberatory social and economic reforms, and radical change. Needless to say, one can also point out towards the collapse of Soviet Union and the socialist bloc in the last decades of the twentieth century, paving the way, arguably, towards a global triumphalism of the neoliberal structural re-adjustment programs, whose systemic violences have been well-documented by scholars,

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activists and artists alike. To be precise, the novel articulates what literary critic Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Barge term as a “further foreclosure upon imaginable alternatives.”43 Yet, what also needs to be pointed out, the indenture comes to stand in the novel as the novelist’s own queasiness about the complexities and messy realities of class-antagonisms and conflicts. A queasiness, that I would argue, stands at the heart of the very institution of the global Anglophone novel, and its Indian English counterpart, this is a much larger topic that demands complicated research on its own right, and therefore beyond the scope of this particular essay. However, a broadening of our archives to some of Ghosh’s other recent non-fictional work will enable us to locate the essential and embedded discomfort about class-conflict in Sea of Poppies within a larger framework. For example, in his impassioned review of novelist Neel Mukherjee’s novel The Lives of Others, a historical novel on the Naxalbari uprising of 1967, Ghosh expresses his political reservation about what he thinks Mukherjee as a novelist chooses to celebrate. Ghosh writes: The novel’s second glimmer of light relates to Supratik, the Naxalite. At the very end of the book we find out that while living in Medinipur he had invented a means of derailing trains: this technique has been passed on to present-day Maoists in central and eastern India who are now using it to devastating effect. ‘Someone had come from Chhatitisgarh to show them the ropes, and he had mentioned that according to local Maoist lore it was a Bengali invention, the work of a man known as Pratik-da in the late Sixties in some district bordering West Bengal and Bihar. Or was it West Bengal and Orissa?’

This then is the legacy that Neel ascribes to Supratik: a method of derailing trains and

killing unwary passengers: ‘his gift to his future comrades survived and for those who cared to or were old enough to remember, he lived on in his bequest.’

In other words, what Neel chooses to celebrate about Supratik’s life is not the transmis-

sion of a spirit of resistance—something that is more than ever necessary at a time when the environment and the poor are being subjected to devastating violence in the name of ‘growth’—but rather a particular means of resisting: in this instance a technique of mass murder.44

I have quoted this passage at length to show, Ghosh’s rhetoric, impassioned as it is, nevertheless embodies certain contradictions that characterize most discussions of social inequality and social justice movements in liberal Indian political and literary spheres. There is, on the one hand, an admission of the social inequalities and “devastating violence” that plague most of the marginalized communities in India and elsewhere. Without necessarily naming it as such, Ghosh provides a nod to the materialities engendered by capitalist realisms. He does so with a certain amount of empathy. Consequently, there is also a celebration of what Ghosh calls

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a popular “spirit of resistance.” Yet, when confronted with the narrativization of actual instances of resistance, Ghosh turns to the most oft-repeated trope used in Indian mainstream media to represent the Naxalites/Maoists—harbingers of meaningless violence. In conspicuous ways, too, this also happens to be the stereotype through which Naxalbari/Maoism as a movement has been explored in Indian English fiction. For example, in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s novel, English, August, the Naxalite character has been consistently described as “fundamentalist”, inherently unable to deal with the complexities of lived social realities.45 In Nabina Das’ novel Footprints on the Bajra, the Naxalite character appears as a conniving criminal, for whom “revolution” and “popular emancipation” are mere rhetorical tools.46 In that context, Ghosh’s observation about the need to transmit a “spirit of resistance,” appears to be a mere lip service, which does not want to delve into the messy imperfections of the material processes of resistances. While this essay is ultimately about a different text, and a somewhat different, but interrelated set of concerns, which will not allow a more detailed appraisal of the limits and possibilities of Naxalism/Maoism per se, or the movement’s literary representations, what it is keen on doing, is to record the kind of political anxiety about the movement that permeates the Indian Anglophone literary sphere. What this essay also wants to record, is a chronological synchronicity. Sea of Poppies, and Ibis Trilogy itself, were written and published, after all, during a period when Maoists occupied much of the political imagination of both the Indian media and the state, culminating in the Operation Green Hunt, which led to the destruction of thousands of Adivasi communities in central India.47Additionally, this is also a period of intense land-grabs in India, often demonstrating a form of nexus between the Indian state and the corporate machinery, which has not been witnessed in the same way before. It is, then, important to ask ourselves, how does a novel like Sea of Poppies, recording as it does, the violences of the colonial capital, provide spaces—albeit mediated—within which the very contemporaneity of the question of intensifying violence of capital is being addressed and enacted. Speaking predominantly about contemporary American literature, literary scholars La Berge and Shonkwiler argued, “As a methodology, capitalist realism demands an engagement with specific economic forms such as the commodity, money, and finance, as well as organized economic processes such as production and consumption.”48 If such is the nature of Euro-American capitalist realist novels of the post-2008 era, Ghosh turns this very methodology on its head to construct a usable past to narrativize the contemporary instances of “accumulation by dispossession.” Elsewhere, I have written about the extensive documentation that Ghosh does of the process through which Deeti is made landless, and transformed into a member of the

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“excess population”, from which indenture provides her with a kind of respite. Sea of Poppies, then, becomes an allegorical rewriting of the contemporary moment of the land-grab, and its accompanying processes. Yet, much like the way, La Barge and Shonkwiler’s characterization of capitalist realism does not include realities of contemporary class-conflicts, Ghosh’s novel does not know how to resolve the tensions that emerge out of a process of meticulous documentation of structural realities and the dissenting class consciousness born out of them. In this, the novel is strangely complicit with its cultural field—the Indian Anglophone novel. Of course, as a cultural field, Indian Anglophone novel often resolves this problem by bringing onto the forefront a specific form of political anxiety. A form of political anxiety that often survives on an acknowledgement, that economic marginality and class inequality persist, and while it is the task of contemporary literature to comment upon such, the representations of the messiness of the actual instances of class-based and other forms of conflicts are to be avoided within the literary works as them. A critical consciousness about such an anxiety, then, necessarily opens up a rich field of analyses for the literary critic who is invested in understanding what terms such as “agency” and “resistance” have meant within the ever-expanding cultural field that is the Indian Anglophone fiction. In this regard, Sea of Poppies, and especially the novelist’s figuration of the character of Deeti, provide us with a rich representational archive. Ghosh does indeed provide Deeti with a resistential subjectivity—a form of political agency, so to say. But, as my succeeding analysis will show, such representations of agency, never transcend the limits of an overall ideological structure of liberal acceptability. Such a notion of acceptability, I will argue, also remains tied to a complex intersections of ideologies of class, caste and gender.

Instances of Rebellion, Instances of Conformity One can especially think of a crucial scene in Sea of Poppies, where, within the ship Ibis, as the newly-indentured are being transported to Mauritius, Muniya, the young Chamar female laborer, has been separated from the rest of the group by the silahdars and locked up, because of her fast-developing sexual relationship with the Bengali-Muslim boatman Jodu. While this episode marks a watershed moment in many different ways within the novel, I am more interested in analysing this scene as an example of a potential sexualized and casteized instance of class-conflict, which differs, in essence from the ways in which class antagonisms within the factory spaces have been written within a considerable number of 1930s-40s social realist novels, including Godan.

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In Sea of Poppies, the subehdar uses a specific appellation to describe Muniya— “coolie whore.”49 A gendered coinage that demonstrates a strange intersection of class, connotations of degrading labour and transgressive sexuality, the events that surround this word, literally brings on one of the final explosive moments of the novel. And, that final moment, is constituted by a threat of sexual violation: Then they heard Munia’s voice: Bachao! Save me, oh you people, they’re taking me down to their karma … Munia’s words were cut suddenly short, as if a hand had clamped over her lips. Paulette snatched at Deeti’s elbow. Bhauji! We have to do something! Bhauji! There’s no telling what they might do to her.

It passed through Deeti’s mind to say no, this wasn’t her burden, she wasn’t really

everyone’s Bhauji and couldn’t be expected to fight every battle. But then she thought of Munia, all alone, amongst a roomful of silahdars and maistries, and her body rose as of itself. Come: let’s go to the ladder.50

For anyone interested in the question of subjectivity in this novel, especially that of Deeti’s, it would be interesting to observe that the novel does not represent Deeti as someone who is irrevocably radical, or committed to a life of deliberate dissent. In fact, Deeti’s initial reaction, that she is not “everyone’s Bhauji”—a disavowal of the quasi-familial terms of the ship-space—can be read as an attempt to disengage from what is going on, predicated as it is on the notion of individual agency and choice. However, in writing the events as it does, the novel’s narrative demonstrates, how Deeti’s subjectivity, within a specific given moment, goes through a process of gradual transformation, whereby she is continuously engaging with the different, contradictory strains of her own thoughts. We, as readers, are thus let into the political interiority of a peasant-turned-indentured woman’s mind, and become, in the process, the beneficiaries of the kind of omniscient narration that characterizes the classical social realist novels. Deeti, here, appears as much conflicted as the bourgeois protagonists of the generations of “complicated” Indian Anglophone novels that preceded Sea of Poppies. Not only so, it is precisely in the presence of such complicated, contradictory interiorities that the novel creates a blueprint of a form of realist impulse, which remains interested in the questions of class-consciousness, social totality and interior contradictions—the metier of the classical realisms. Deeti’s motivation for dissenting, then, ultimately, emerges from a conglomeration of ambiguous positionalities. As a woman, she feels the threat of sexual violation more acutely than any of the male indentured. As the chosen matriarch of the girmitiya community, she possesses the symbolic power to initiate and lead an action for rescuing Munia. Yet, there is a part of her that is more concerned with

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self-survival and wants to stay away from the “trouble.” There is also a chance, as is evident in her continued doubt about being called “bhauji”, that it is more as a woman that she relates to Munia’s trials than as the quasi-familial matriarch. But even then, it is precisely in her capacity as “bhauji” or the designated role of the matriarch, that Deeti decides to act. The narrative represents her agency as torn between two things—a need for self-preservation, and an almost corporeal spontaneity, which attributes the final meaning to her actions, a transgression of the rational dictats of her mind. “Her body rose as of itself,”51 the novel informs us. It is as if there is an innate alienation between her body and mind, a split, where her body empathizes with Muniya, even as her mind wants to be protective about her own interests. This mind-body split, written in the novel through a kind of corporeality that makes Deeti “helpless”, then, also contributes to a kind of figuration of a form of feminine subjectivity, that trumps over the feudal, normative femininity, from within which Deeti had previously acted when within the factory, and which forms the foundational gender ideology of novels like that of Premchand’s Godaan. Undoubtedly, when the novel writes Deeti as banging on the hatch of the room where Muniya had been locked up, it does so from a deliberate desire to represent her within a moment of active resistance. To put it simply, Deeti finds agency in clearly asserting her power to confront the ship-authorities. If her entire trajectory so far has been one of acquiring agency and subjectivity through what has often been termed as “everyday forms of resistances” by many cultural and social theorists52—engaging in those insidious and micro-forms of social negotiations which always stop short of direct confrontation—it is through her actions in knocking the doors of the “great paltans of maistries and silahdars,”53as she calls the ship authorities, that Deeti enters upon a qualitatively different strategy of dissent. Needless to say, there is a spectacularity inherent in the very act of Deeti’s banging on the door. This is also the kind of spectacularity that critical readers in the subcontinent have come to associate with the social realist representations of class conflicts— undertaken mostly within the factory premises, embodied primarily by male workers such as Premchand’s Gobar. There is then an important re-writing of the classical social realist trope of spectacular class struggles in Sea of Poppies. Class conflict, in Sea of Poppies, is invariably gendered and sexualized. Not only is class-conflict in Sea of Poppies invariably sexualized and gendered, class-conflict in the novel, contrary to the social realist novels, have been removed from both the spaces and concerns of economic production. Instead, class-conflict has been represented as tied to issues of reproduction, including, but not limited to the realms of gender, sexuality and sexual violence. The ship, as tied as it is to capitalist maritime regimes, as many have argued,54is predominantly a mode of transportation for Deeti and her fellow-travellers. A

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transient space, which is also highly scrutinized and policed, the ship serves as a kind of limbo for Deeti and the other indentured labourers. In terms of their economic class and productive subjectivities, then, the ship represents at best a form of hazy, confusing indecisiveness. Uprooted from their previous occupations, and homes, they are awaiting the life of an indentured. Within the ship, though, they are not subsumed into the indenture’s structures yet. In other words, as readers, what we are propelled towards thinking, is the valence of the very notion of class-conflict in an era of de-industrialization. The ship, then, exists within the novel as an economic artefact, whose relationship to capitalist modernity is irrevocable, yet removed from the processes of production. The ship, then, comes to stand in–albeit in a complicated, mediated kind of a way–for a de-industrialized capitalist modernity, reminiscent of our contemporary times. The novel, then, puts forward certain theoretical-historical questions, mediated as they are, through the formal-technical devices of a historical novel. Such theoretical-historical questions, then, also demand a metaphorical reading of the novel, locating it within a specifically late twentieth and early twenty-first­-century global capitalism. One such crucial question happens to be, in a situation where class-as-economic-subjectivity, is not quite relevant, can the language and aesthetics of spectacular class-conflicts have political immediacy for those whose need to regain dignity exceeds a narrow definition of class? Quite simply, in the novel such was the case with both Muniya and Deeti. Can one have an expansive definition of both class and economic subjectivity that subsumes within itself both gender and sexuality? None of these questions are particularly new. What Sea of Poppies does, effectively, then, is to ask, often in metaphorical terms, how do we begin to perceive these complex intersections in a context where de-industrialization, coupled with complex materialities of the land-grab, create forms of economic precarity that cannot be necessarily understood through classical Marxist notions of classas-tied-to-production within the factory spaces. Undeniably, neither Muniya’s captivity nor Deeti’s desire for self-preservation can be understood without a foundational understanding of their economic precarity. It is their economic precarity that has compelled them to be inside the ship to begin with. Yet, a mere narrative of economic precarity, and an ensuing structural class subjectivity, cannot provide an adequate answer to the events they had to encounter inside the ship. Understanding of gender and sexuality need to be inserted within that very narrative of economic precarity. Directing our attention, then, to the complicated and critical place that questions of gender and sexuality have historically assumed within Marxist and socialist thoughts,—often through its sheer absence—Ghosh’s novel points out to a paradox. If the period during which his Ibis Trilogy was published, happens to be one when questions of gender and sexuality burst into the Indian public

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spheres in ways they have not quite done so before, arguably, then, this period also happens to be one of an intensifying neoliberal restructuration of life, accompanied by massive de-industrialization. De-industrialization, invariably, makes the narrative of factory-based class conflict structurally irrelevant. What does, then, Deeti’s “rising up”55come to imply in such a context? The novel, then, prompts its readers to ask certain complex questions. Has class, then, for example, been completely and irrevocably replaced by other categories, such as gender? Can gender be ever looked into without a consideration of class and other attending factors? If “class” as an organizing category has lost its social, political, ideological and cultural relevance, then what kind of new political and aesthetic language can residual memories of class conflicts bring about? Is there even a space for such mediated memories of class-conflicts in a supposedly post-class world, especially for movements which tether themselves to issues of gender and sexuality ? Tentative answers to such questions, I argue, can be found in the way in which Deeti frames this very confrontation as a combination of a performance of reverence and dissent. This is especially evident in the manner she addresses the silahdar, What’s going on with you coolies? Came the answer. What’s this noise? You know very well what’s going on, said Deeti. You’ve taken one of our girls away. We’re worried about her. Worried, are you?—the sneer was audible—why weren’t you worried when she was whoring herself to a lascar? A Muslim at that? Malik, said Deeti. Let her come back to us, and we’ll settle the matter amongst us. It’s best that we deal with our own. It’s too late for that; subedar-ji says she has to be kept in a safe place from now on. Safe? Said Deeti. Amongst all of you? Don’t tell me that stuff: I’ve seen it all—sab dekhchukalbani. Go: tell your subedar that we want to see our girl and won’t rest till we do. Go. Right now.56

Compare this passage with the one in Premchand’s Godaan. Meanwhile, at the factory where Gobar worked, some disturbance or other kept boiling up almost every day. The new budget had imposed a tax on sugar, giving the mill owners a good excuse to cut wages. For every five rupees loss from the tax, there was now a gain of ten rupees from the reduced wages. For months the controversy had been raging in the mill. The labour union was prepared to strike. Reduce the wages and they’d all walk out. Even a half-price cut was unacceptable. When there had not been even a half-price raise during these tough times, why should they now go along with this loss?”57

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Contrary to Premchand’s passage, where a dissenting collectivity is being imagined through the critical presence of the labour union in the sugar factory, which, then grants upon the identity “worker” a privileged political status, what Deeti invokes here is the right of the girmitiyas to get back Muniya as a community of elders. In using coinages like “our own,”58she transforms the girmitiyas almost into a village community, which possesses its own codes of dealing with gendered and sexual deviations. Nowhere does Deeti justify Munia’s right to independent sexuality, nor does she claim that Munia might not have done anything wrong in talking to Jodu. Instead, what she invokes, is an understanding that issues of sexuality and gender are things that are intrinsic to the community, and should be dealt with as such. In the same vein, she addresses the silahdar as “Malik”59or “Lord”, thus, making it clear that between the two of them it is he who demands more respect and wields more power. But at the same time, she does not flinch from assuming authority, and without mincing her words, lets the silahdar know that she is fully aware of the threat of sexual violence that awaits Munia. In fact, throughout this entire confrontation, Deeti makes strategic use of the rural, feudal norms in a way that might work to her advantage. Therefore, when she is finally allowed to go in to meet Munia, she insists that she take her husband Kalua with her. Here again, Deeti falls back upon a notion of an ideal feudal femininity, which is predicated upon a normalization of a woman’s dependence upon her husband. Deeti does not challenge the role, but at the same time, her attempt to include Kalua within the activities can also be understood as a form of legalism: gathering another witness for what would happen inside. Additionally, when the silahdar leads her through the passage and the ladder to where Munia has been kept, Deeti lengthens her “ghungta” (veil), thus embarking upon a performance of a chaste femininity, which would reinforce her status as the matriarch of the migrants, and would also be operative in establishing some kind of authority amongst the silahdars. The veil also becomes a symbolic attempt to ward off any potential threat of sexual violence. What needs to be observed here, then, that there is no effort to imagine a new identity based upon one’s economic identity and labor, as had historically often been the case with labour unions, and their representations in novels such as Godaan. Instead, there is a re-imagination of feudal norms of hierarchy and gender—transported within the ship—a space that remains irrevocably tied to mercantile and plantation capital, while being removed from the processes of production that come with such systems. For the indentured, then, the ship comes to occupy a dubious and ambiguous space. Indicative of the indentured’s momentary liberation from the cycles of production, as it traverses the ocean with them inside its belly, the ship, nevertheless, is also irrevocably tied to the indentured’s dreams and anticipation of a better life through labour. An anticipation, imprecise as it is

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during this specific moment, ties the indentured to a plantation labour-production regime. As literary critic Jasper Bernes comments, “History in capitalism is always, to some extent, the history of work.”60 In Ghosh’s novel, however, there is a marked absence of definitive subjectivities that come with work. Instead, “work” itself appears to be in flux, forever suspended between two continents—India and Africa. The ship concretizes the state of that flux. Consequently, what is missing from this history of labour-subjectivities that Ghosh proposes here, is a history of resistance tied strictly to the notion of work. Instead, dissenting subjectivity in Sea of Poppies always bypasses work, while being tangentially related to it. This is precisely the place where Deeti’s performance of a specific kind of femininity assumes significance. For example, the ghungta that she adorns, is also a performance of a casteized femininity. Literally operating as a piece of cloth that symbolically separates her from Muniya, Deeti’s chaste performance seems to indicate, she might be advocating for a chamar-woman, but she is not one herself, the latter marked by her assertive sexuality. Furthermore, she might even be married to a low-caste man, but in her performances of the “proper”, “demure”, “dependent femininity”, she is still the upper-caste peasant woman that she was before she boarded the ship. The struggle, here, as she puts it, is for “izzat” or “respect.” That “izzat” or “respect”, unlike the passage in Premchand’s novel, is not exclusively about economic dignity. Although, as I have written earlier, without the economic indignity, Deeti’s quest for “izzat” will not make much sense either. Class conflict, here, then, assumes a much broader meaning than the economic demands of a wage labourer. Instead, class conflict, here, becomes gendered and sexualized, with caste constituting one of its most important sub-texts. Community, then, here, also comes to circumscribe caste, and its specific modes of performances, reconstructed as it is within the holds of the ship, removed from a casteized economy’s “originary” point in rural India. In the process, Deeti earns a political subjectivity—the “one who is always inciting the others against us.”61 To attain a political subjectivity through a quest for one’s individual and/or communal dignity within the spaces of Ibis, thus, is also to become an antagonist. To be dubbed as an antagonist within the Ibis is also to raise the consternation that one is not going to be the docile labourer-worker that the institution of indenture demands. Inadvertently, then, Deeti gets placed within a structure of class conflict. Yet, this is a form of class-conflict that hardly corresponds to the categories of a trade-unionist understanding of Marxism. Class here not only intersects with gender and caste, but also resides outside of the essential characteristics of a factory-based wage labourer’s materialities. The girmitiya, then, as I have argued elsewhere, although recruited through a contract, is not quite a wage labourer, thus demanding a re-thinking of the very category of “class conflict”, as it comes to be applied to their specific lived experiences.62

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There is, then, in this novel, a displacement of class understood predominantly through the lens of the factory and the factory worker. But, most crucially, such a displacement of the idea of the factory does not lead to a displacement of capital as a category and organizing principle of social relations, which is supposed to have brought class into being in the very first place. In other words, mediated as it is through nineteenth-century histories, the novel also places us within a contemporary concern—the de-industrialized neoliberal economy, and its concomitant dissociation from the spaces of a factory as one of the primary institutions of capital’s operations. Additionally, within the novel, the structural reality of factorylessness is accompanied by an absence of a militant, working-class collective consciousness, which guides the workers in Premchand’s novel. What is left, then, is a stream of negotiations, a strategic combination of defiance, reverence and performance of normativity, which will supposedly ensure one’s survival. Of course, in this strategic re-combination, lies Deeti’s agency. But, what is absent even within this notion of agency is an ideological imagination of an existence, which moves beyond a defensive desire for self-preservation and survival. In contrast to Premchand’s Dhania, then, Ghosh allows his Deeti the power and right to act. What he does not give her, then, is to orient that action towards a world that moves beyond coercive regimes of power—economic and otherwise. There is, then, in Sea of Poppies, no female agency that includes the work of the political imagination of an alternative world. The world in which Ghosh’s women reside, is strictly circumscribed by the norms of capitalist realism, and it remains so for them during the entire course of the novel. Yet, Sea of Poppies is not quite devoid of the often chaotic and gritty materialiaties that accompany conflicts in hugely unequal spaces. As it is, Deeti’s husband ends up killing one of the subehdars, and is himself mercilessly flogged afterwards. He flees the ship, along with a few others, invoking a more complicated tradition of subaltern rebellion on sea.63

Conclusion: Gender and Spectacular Resistance In this spectacular rebellion, though, women are conspicuously absent. In fact, Deeti and the other women watch from the deck of the ship as the men leave. To be precise, the women become passive spectators in a conflict in which they, too, have participated in various ways. In the ultimate resort, then, there is an ideological continuity between Dhania and Deeti. Unlike Dhania, Deeti has been granted a relatively autonomous access to economic subjectivity. What she has not been given is a right to inhabit fully a resistential political subjectivity. More specifically, what Deeti has not been given, is the right to be an intellectual subject

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who is capable of imagining different political future beyond the strongholds of capital. Her world—even when she is engaged in spectacular resistance of sorts—is one of persistent pragmatism. In doing so, what Ghosh gives Deeti in terms of her political subjectivity with one hand, he takes it away with another. In Deeti, then, he creates essentially a capitalist realist subject. A capitalist realist subject, who, in spite of embodying a complex interiority, nonetheless, resides outside of the realm of bourgeois subjectivity. It is in this contested realm of subjectivity that Ghosh locates the crucial and long diachronic aesthetic-political work of realism. The kind of work, as I have shown, that cannot be quite understood through the dichotomous categories that Anjaria sets up. If realism as a form of writing prose-fiction is ultimately committed to exploring the intimate lives of capital, its one kind of limit lay in Premchand’s failure to imagine the lives of a rural-peasant woman within its folds without any essential male-familial mediation. The limits of Ghosh’s imagination, on the other hand, lie in the fact that even while acknowledging all the violences of capital, his peasant-woman cannot be taken out of its totalizing cycles. The liberation of a peasant-woman from the rural semi-feudalism, for Ghosh, then, lies in her embracing of the labour regimes of the global plantation complex. In this limitation of narrative imagination, one can locate, as the unsaid subtext, the question of the loss of a suitable political alternative to capitalism. This is also precisely the marker of the lapse of time between Premchand and Ghosh. A lapse of time that can also be measured through the historical loss of a political alternative of a socialist dream. In Ghosh’s making of indenture one of the primary theoretical-aesthetic conduits of the novel Sea of Poppies, there is a mourning for that loss. Indenture, after all, unlike slavery, creates a façade of choice, thus not only making the indentured complicit in her own oppression, but also creating a narrative of enrichment and progress around it. As do neoliberal regimes of labour. Yet, in that mourning, there is ultimately a submission, an acceptance—however reluctant, however dignified—to the ethos of capitalist realism. Needless to say, in this narrative of submission, the novel creates a far more complex notion of precarity, as is obvious in the choices that Deeti is compelled to make. Furthermore, in this narrative of mournful, dignified submission that Ghosh puts forward, through the mediated forms of a retrospective realist novel, the blueprint of a gendered capitalist realist subject, for whom, even the forms of resistance resembling a militant class-conflict is ultimately about a more humane form of integration into the capital’s cycles of unfree labour. Ghosh’s novel, then, beyond Anjaria’s purported binaries, is about a deep engagement with a “realist impulse.” That “realist impulse” lies in the ultimate omniscience of capital in Ghosh’s novel, in the novel’s ultimate embracing of the latter’s centrality in constituting the emotional interiority of the characters under consideration. And, it is

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precisely in documenting that omniscience of capital that the novel also becomes a crucial object of the twenty-first century globalized letters, providing as it does, a mediated interpretation of the inherently globalizing history of capital in its specific moments of development.

Notes 1

U. Anjaria, “The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, 2 (2016): 278–294.

2

Anjaria, “The Realist Impulse,” 278.

3

K. Marx, and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Classics, 2002).

4

Elsewhere, I have written about such diversity of forms in greater details. See N. Dhar, “Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice, and Indian Indentureship in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 48, 1(2017): 1–35.

5

M. Van der Linden, “The Globalization of Labour and Working Class History and its Consequences,” in J. Lucassen, ed., Global Labour History: A State of the Art (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), 13–38.

6 7

Van der Linden, “The Globalization of Labour,” 21. S. Perera, No Country: Working Class Writing in the Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

8

For examples of such scholarship, see A. Arora, “‘The Sea is History’: Opium, Colonialism and Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 42, 3-4 (2012): 21–42; J. Crane, “Beyond the Cape: Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic,” Post-colonial Text 6, 4 (2011): 1–16; F. Lionnet, “World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys: J-M.G Le Clezio and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels,” Comparative Literature 67, 3 (2015): 287–311; A. Mohan, “Maritime Transmodernities and The Ibis Trilogy,” Postcolonial Text 14, 3 & 4 (2019): 1–24; R. Rai and A. M. Pinkney,“The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Ghosh,” in C. Sankaran, ed., History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012): 65–78.

9

Lionnet, “World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys.”

10

In 2016, Journal of Asian Studies organized a roundtable on Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy. Scholars such as Clare Anderson, Gaurav Desai, Mark R. Frost and Pedro Machado, provided inter-disciplinary and trans-national, trans-oceanic readings of the novels, delineating them from the perspectives of both historians and literary critics. Eventually, Ghosh also responded to their critiques. For more details, see C. Anderson, “Empire and Exile: Reflections on Ibis Trilogy,” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1523–1530; G. Desai, “The Noveslist as Linkister,” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1531–1536; M. Frost, “Amitav Ghosh and the Art of Thick Description: History in the Ibis Trilogy,” American Historical Review 121, 5, (2016): 1537–1544; P. Machado, “Views from Other Boats: On Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean ‘Worlds,’”American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1545–1551; A. Ghosh, “Storytelling and the Spectrum of the Past,” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1552–1565.

11

It is possible, for example, to trace the novel’s re-worlding of slave-narratives and the sea novel, genres which ultimately address the regimes of unfree labour or chattel slavery, and the complex forms of maritime labour that the opening up of the sea to trade routes and other forms of capitalist

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circulation entailed. For more details of such readings, see Crane, “Beyond the Cape,” and E. Ho, “The Neo-Victorian at Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian,” in N. Boehm-Schnitker and S. Gruss, eds., Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (New York: Routledge, 2014), 165–178. 12

U. Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth Century Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

13

J. Etsy and C. Lye, “Peripheral Realisms,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, 3 (2012): 269–288.

14

For a more detailed analysis of the issue of “historical accuracy” and the ways in which it can complicate the inter-weaving of the disciplines of world history and world literature, see M. Hawas, “Preface, ” in M. Hawas, ed., The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History (New York: Routledge, 2018), xvi–xxv.

15

E. Kent, “‘Ship Siblings:’ Globalisation, Neo-Liberal Aesthetics, and Neo-Victorian Form in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies,” Neo-Victorian Studies 8, 1 (2015): 107–130 and G. Forter, Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

16

Anjaria, “The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality,” 280.

17

U. Anjaria, “Twenty First Century Realism.” Oxford Research Encyclopaedias. July 27, 2017: 6, https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acre�fore-9780190201098-e-194, accessed 6 Apr. 2022.

18

F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 48.

19

Fukuyama, The End of History, 91.

20

For such critics of realism, see C. Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Metheun, 1980); T. Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); and E. W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

21

N. Dhar, “Moving Beyond the Memory Question: Narratives of South Asian indenture, global memory capitalism and its discontents,” in A. Bhardwaj and J. Misrahi-Barak, eds., Kala-Pani Crossings: Re-Visiting 19th Century Migrations from India’s Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2021), 31–50.

22

M. Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a Cow, translated by Gordon C. Roadarmel (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2017), 255.

23

M. Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

24

Anjaria, Realism in the Twentieth Century Novel.

25

A. McClanahan, “Financialization,” in R. Greenwald-Smith, ed., American Literature in Transition: 2000-2010 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 239–254.

26

S. Mohanty, “Introduction,” in Fakir Mohan Senapati, translated by Rabi Shankar Misra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St.-Pierre, Six Acres And A Third: The Classic NineteenthCentury Novel About Colonial India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 2.

27

Mohanty, “Introduction,” 2.

28

Dhar, “Shadows of Slavery.”

29

For a more detailed exposition on the salience of the figure of the peasant in Premchand’s fiction, see S. B. Upadhyay, “Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peasantry in North India,” Modern Asian Studies 45, 5 (September 2011): 1227–1259 and G. Pandey, “Premchand and the Peasantry Constrained Realism,” Economic and Political Weekly 18, 26 (June 15, 1983): 1147–1155.

30

U. Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened To The Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,” in K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays In Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 28.

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31

T. Niranjana, Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration Between India and Trinidad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 75.

32

Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 75.

33

Niranjana, Mobilizing India, 83.

34

Nandini Dhar, “Shadows of Slavery.”

35

A. Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 86.

36

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 86.

37

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 86.

38

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 87.

39

F. Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009).

40

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 90.

41

Dhar, “Shadows of Slavery.”

42

M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 6.

43

A. Shonkwiler and L. C. La Barge, “Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism,” in A. Shonkwiler and L. C. La Barge, eds., Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 3.

44

A. Ghosh, “Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others: A Review,” May 3, 2014 (Published in Author’s blog: https://amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=6400#respond), accessed on January 21, 2022.

45

U. Chatterjee, English, August (New York: New York Review Books, 1988).

46

N. Das, Footprints on the Bajra (New Delhi: Pustak Mahal, 2010).

47

For more details about Operation Green Hunt, see A. Sethi, “Green Hunt: The Anatomy of an Operation,” The Hindu, February 6, 2013 (https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Green-Huntthe-anatomy-of-an-operation/article16812797.ece), accessed January 21, 2022; Also see A. Sharma, “Government to send 2,000 para-military men of Naga unit to fight Maoists in Bastar,” The Economic Times, August 19, 2014, (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ government-to-send-2000-para-military-men-of-naga-unit-to-fight-maoists-in-bastar/articleshow/40383919.cms), accessed January 21, 2022.

48

Shonkwiler and La Barge, “Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism,” 11.

49

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 432

50

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 432.

51

Ibid.

52

See J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); S. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and A. Ghosh, ed., Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia (New York, NJ: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

53

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 432.

54

P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), J. Dayan, “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships and Routes: The Middle Passage as Metaphor,” Research in African Literature 27, 4 (1996): 7–14.

55

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 432.

56

Ibid., 433.

57

Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a Cow, 344.

58

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 433.

59

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 433.

60

J. Bernes,The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3.

61

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 435.

violence, indenture and capitalist realism in amitav ghosh’s sea of poppies 147

62

Dhar, “Shadows of Slavery.”

63

For more details, see L. Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); M. Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Viking, 2012); P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000); and I. F. Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in United States and Sierra Leone (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003).

Works Cited Anderson, Clare. “Empire and Exile: Reflections on Ibis Trilogy.” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1523–1530. Anjaria, Ulka. Realism in the Twentieth Century Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ______. “The Realist Impulse and the Future of Postcoloniality.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 49, 2 (2016): 278–294. ———. “Twenty First Century Realism.” Oxford Research Encyclopaedias. July 27, 2017, https://oxfordre. com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-194, accessed 6 Apr. 2022. Arora, Anupama. “‘The Sea is History’: Opium, Colonialism and Migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 42, 3-4 (2012): 21–42. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Metheun, 1980. Bernes, Jasper. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Chakravarti, Uma. “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past.” In Recasting Women: Essays In Indian Colonial History, edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, 27–87. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Chatterjee, Upamanyu. English, August. New York: New York Review Books, 1988. Crane, Jacob. “Beyond the Cape: Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic.” Post-colonial Text 6, 4 (2011): 1–16. Das, Nabina. Footprints on the Bajra. New Delhi: Pustak Mahal, 2010. Dayan, Joan. “Paul Gilroy’s Slaves, Ships and Routes: The Middle Passage as Metaphor.” Research in African Literature, 27, 4 (1996): 7–14. Desai, Gaurav. “The Novelist as Linkister.” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1531–1536. Dhar, Nandini. “Shadows of Slavery, Discourses of Choice, and Indian Indentureship in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 48, 1 (2017): 1–35. ———. “Moving Beyond the Memory Question: Narratives of South Asian indenture, global memory capitalism and its discontents.” In Kala-Pani Crossings: Re-Visiting 19th Century Migrations from India’s Perspectives, edited by Ashutush Bhardwaj and Judith Misrahi-Barak, 31–50. New York: Routledge, 2021. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1983.

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Engels, Friedrich. The Conditions of the Working Class in England. New York: Penguin Classics, 2009. Etsy, Jed and Colleen Lye. “Peripheral Realisms.” Modern Language Quarterly 73, 3 (2012): 269–288. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2010. Forter, Greg. Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Frost, Mark. “Amitav Ghosh and the Art of Thick Description: History in the Ibis Trilogy.” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1537–1544. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. ———. “Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others: A Review.” May 3, 2014 (Published in Author’s blog: https://amitavghosh.com/blog/?p=6400#respond), accessed on January 21, 2022. ———. “Storytelling and the Spectrum of the Past.” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1552–1565. Ghosh, Anindita, ed. Behind the Veil: Resistance, Women and the Everyday in Colonial South Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Hawas, May. “Preface.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, edited by May Hawas, xvi–xxv. New York: Routledge, 2018. Ho, Elizabeth. “The Neo-Victorian at Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian.” In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, edited by Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 165–78. New York: Routledge, 2014. Kent, Eddy. “‘Ship Siblings’: Globalisation, Neo-Liberal Aesthetics, and Neo-Victorian Form in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.” Neo-Victorian Studies 8, 1 (2015): 107–130. Linden, Marcel Van der. “The Globalization of Labour and Working Class History and its Consequences.” In Global Labour History: A State of the Art, edited by Jan Lucassen, 13–38. Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2008. Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2000. Lionnet, Francoise. “World Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Coolie Odysseys: J-M.G Le Clezio and Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean Novels.” Comparative Literature 67, 3 (2015): 287–311. Machado, Pedro. “Views from Other Boats: On Amitav Ghosh’s Indian Ocean ‘Worlds’” American Historical Review 121, 5 (2016): 1545–1551. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Classics, 2002. McClanahan, Annie. “Financialization.” In American Literature in Transition: 2000-2010, edited by Rachel Greenwald-Smith, 239–254. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Mohan, Anupama. “Maritime Transmodernities and The Ibis Trilogy.” Postcolonial Text 14, 3 & 4 (2019): 1–24. Mohanty, Satya. “Introduction.” In Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel About Colonial India by Fakir Mohan Senapati. Translated from Oriya by Rabi Shankar Misra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St.-Pierre, 1–30. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, 2. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Osagie, Iyonolu Folayan. The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in United States and Sierra Leone. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003.

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Pandey, Geetanjali. “Premchand and the Peasantry Constrained Realism.” Economic and Political Weekly 18, 26 (June 15, 1983): 1149–1155. Perera, Sonali. No Country: Working Class Writing in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Premchand, Munshi. Godaan: The Gift of a Cow. Translated by Gordon C. Roadarmel. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2017. Rai, Rajesh, and Andrea Marion Pinkney. “The Girmitiyas’ Journey in Amitav Ghosh.” In History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran, 65–78. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012. Rediker, Marcus. The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom. New York: Viking, 2012. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985. Sethi, Aman. “Green Hunt: The Anatomy of an Operation.” The Hindu, February 6, 2013 (https://www. thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Green-Hunt-the-anatomy-of-an-operation/article16812797.ece), accessed January 21, 2022. Sharma, Aman. “Government to send 2,000 para-military men of Naga unit to fight Maoists in Bastar.” The Economic Times, August 19, 2014. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ politics-and-nation/government-to-send-2000-para-military-men-of-naga-unit-to-fight-maoistsin-bastar/articleshow/40383919.cms, accessed January 21, 2022. Shonkwiler, Alison and Leigh Claire La Barge. “Introduction: A Theory of Capitalist Realism.” In Reading Capitalist Realism, edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Clare La Barge, 1–25. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2014. Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan. “Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peasantry in North India.” Modern Asian Studies 45, 5 (September 2011): 1227–1259.

CHAPTER 6

Vacant Villages: Policing Riots in Colonial India Radha Kumar

Abstract This chapter looks at the policing of two caste-communities in twentieth-century South India to show how the modern state brought epistemic and legal violence to bear upon selected population groups. Stretched thin in the vast countryside, the colonial police force optimized its resources by categorizing its objects by caste, so that certain communities received extra state protection while others were criminalized and subject to frequent state force. While police violence is most visible in the state archive at the moment of spectacular violence—the riot and police fire, it impacted the everyday lives of subjects more subtly over an extended period, both before and after the riot. Finally, police violence was gendered. In the aftermath of riots, criminal procedure typically targeted men of specific communities, leaving entire villages bereft of its men for months on end, thereby enacting a different, archivally less visible, form of violence on women.

Keywords: Violence; Policing; Community; Caste; Gender

The modern nation-state emerged as among the foremost agents of violence in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century worlds. Across historical accounts of colonial conquest, religious conflict, class unrest, and environmental ravage, the state’s military and police apparatus are seen to play a key role in enacting and mediating violence.1 Moreover, since the modern state—whether colonial or independent, authoritarian or democratic—inevitably frames its violence as legal, a study of modern violence leads us to interrogating legal narratives. Indeed, an important endeavour in global legal studies scholarship has been to uncover the violence that legal interpretation unleashes—on individuals deemed guilty in a judicial court, on segments of the population deemed lesser citizens, or on entire territories deemed spaces of exception.2 A history of physical violence, then, also calls for a history of epistemic violence. A critical component of the modern state’s monopoly over legitimate violence was the formation of professionalized police forces that replaced less formal policing bodies earlier drawn from local communities—an extended process that occurred in Europe and its colonies from the eighteenth century onwards.3 Tasked with the mandate of maintaining social and economic order, policing relied

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on state knowledge that classified populations based on race, class, gender, and community to choose the objects of its coercive surveillance.4 To give some scattered, but immediately recognizable, examples from across this era—respective national police forces targeted homeless vagrants in nineteenth-century England and prostitutes in the twentieth century, North African immigrants in twentieth-century Paris, and indigenous women in twenty-first-century North America.5 It is important to note that such examples of targeted policing do not reflect a gap between an ostensibly equal, non-violent law and errant, violent policing. A long tradition of British Marxist historical scholarship has demonstrated how legal codification from the eighteenth century onwards privileged owners of property.6 In the colonial context, racial difference limited the promises of liberal law, the latter’s centrality to justifying foreign rule notwithstanding.7 For instance, Elizabeth Kolsky examines the mid-nineteenth-century writing of the Indian Code of Criminal Procedure, 1861, to show how racial difference was written into legal procedure itself.8 More broadly, legal scholars have challenged objectivist understandings of law to foreground instead the discourses of power in which legal narratives are embedded.9 In British India, Orientalist state knowledge that classified native society in terms of religious and caste community—whose members supposedly lacked individual agency and behaved in a culturally predetermined manner according to the dictates of sacred text or social custom—worked its way into legal statutes and criminal procedure.10 In the southern, Tamil-speaking region of the former Madras Presidency (present-day Tamil Nadu), where this article is set, caste, more than religion, shaped the patterns of rural policing. It was especially over the second half of the nineteenth century that knowledges of caste became firmly consolidated through operations like the national census, as shown in Bernard Cohn’s pathbreaking work.11 Around the same time, the police institution was also professionalized. Perennially under-funded and outnumbered by the population it was meant to watch, the force relied on, and reproduced, knowledges of caste in optimising its resources, especially in the vast spaces of the countryside.12 In particular, policing’s reliance on caste facilitated its work of maintaining economic order, since there were considerable overlaps between caste and class identities. Accordingly, policemen typically offered extra protection to mercantile and landed castes, while training their gaze at men of labouring and vagrant castes as criminal suspects. Tracking the policing of two caste-communities that notoriously confronted each other in violent riots in 1899 and 1918, this chapter shows how epistemic violence and legal violence informed the lives of colonized subjects in southern India around the turn of the twentieth century.13

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The first of these two castes are the Nadars, once known as Shanars, who occupied a very low position in the caste hierarchy owing to their “impure” occupation, toddy-tapping. In the late nineteenth century, the Nadars used the changes occurring under colonial rule to advance their social and economic position.14 Many of them embraced Christianity, moved to the cities, gave up toddy-tapping, and became traders and moneylenders instead. Alongside, they Sanskritised—giving up meat and alcohol consumption, adopting different religious, social, and sartorial practices—and changed their caste name to Nadar.15 These changes were resented by other caste groups, both higher- and lower-ranked than the Nadars. Prominent among these were three allied caste groups—Maravar, Kallar, and Agamudaiyar— collectively termed Thevars, the second of this chapter’s protagonists, who saw themselves as standing right above Nadars in the caste hierarchy. To make the rivalry sharper, as the Nadars were taking advantage of colonial conditions, the Thevars were getting marginalized.16 In the precolonial period, Thevars had held some power by virtue of their martial skills, either as bandits/policemen when they stayed at the periphery of a settlement, or as “little kings” when they acquired control over a small territory.17 With the onset of colonial rule, the political powers of the little kings were taken away, while the poorer policemen were directly criminalized. Deprived of their occupation, several members of the caste did indeed turn to crime in the late-nineteenth century.18 They were referred to as criminal castes in administrative and ethnographic writing of the late nineteenth century, and when the Criminal Tribes Act was extended to Madras Presidency in 1911, Kallars and Maravars of several villages were notified as criminal under the act. Over the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Maravars and Nadars confronted each other multiple times on questions of caste precedence—both on the streets and in courthouses. Two of these were especially important and are discussed in this chapter—the 1899 riot in Sivakasi and the 1918 riot in Kamuthi. But in addition to the actual moments of riot, I also look at the routine, extended forms of rural policing that followed them. In examining routine rural policing, this essay seeks to retrieve long-term subaltern experiences of state violence that are frequently absent from a historiography which has emphasized exceptional moments of violent policing in the colonial countryside. The following pages, in contrast, show that state violence was exercised in rural spaces over different temporalities—during a riot, certainly, but also in the days immediately after, and, in more subtle ways, for years afterwards. This was achieved, firstly, through the imposition of armed police forces that served as enduring, visible, and costly symbols of coercive state authority for the inhabitants of a region that had witnessed violence. Secondly, state violence was exerted through the workings of a harsh judicial process which prosecuted, and persecuted, males of specific castes.

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The 1899 Riot By the 1870s, Nadars of southern Madras Presidency were asserting their rights to enter various regional temples—including those in Madurai, Srivilliputhur, Sivakasi, and Kamuthi—and to conduct processions in public streets. Some of these attempts were squashed by the local police and magistracy on grounds that they would cause a breach of the peace, others entered judicial courts, while a few ended in violent riots. As of 1897, two temples were prominent sites of contention: these were located in the towns of Sivakasi and Kamuthi, about fifty miles away from each other. The first, Sivakasi, was home to a prestigious Siva temple to which Nadars were denied entry. In 1897, the temple had to be temporarily shut down following a dispute between Nadars and other communities over the former’s right to enter the temple. Several minor altercations, inside and outside the courtrooms, continued to occur over the next few months. Despite the running tension, no preventive police action was taken to maintain order in the town, a failure of policing that would not be repeated in the decades to follow. The temple itself, however, was kept shut by its authorities for several months. Unlike Sivakasi, which was a public temple, the Kamuthi temple was the private property of the Maravar Raja of Ramanathapuram. Consequently, the conflict over access to this temple entered the realm of civil dispute. The Raja had recently filed a civil suit against a few local Nadars for entering and “defiling” the temple. At the time of the Sivakasi riot of 1899, Nadars were awaiting the court’s decision on this issue. The uncertainty over the Kamuthi proceedings added considerably to the prevailing atmosphere of tension across the region.19 Below the issue of caste precedence in temple entry ran strong undercurrents of economic conflict. Both Sivakasi and Kamuthi were among the towns to which Nadars had immigrated over the past few decades, to establish them as strong Nadar centres. In Sivakasi, a small town with a population of around 12,000 in the 1891 census, Nadars comprised around 70% of the population. Maravars, in contrast, numbered only about 500. In contrast, the surrounding countryside was dominated by Maravars. This was a dry region, not irrigated by any of the massive dams the British were building in other parts of the country, and home to several permanently settled zamindari estates. Consequently, Maravars here occupied the spectrum of economic positions, from the very rich landholders to the poor landless. The caste conflict between Maravars and Nadars over temple entry was therefore also an economic conflict between rural farmers left out of agrarian improvement, on the one hand, and urban traders benefiting from colonial trade, on the other. On the afternoon of 26 April 1899, there was a riot in the Maravar quarters of Sivakasi town. Houses were set on fire, gunshots exchanged, and the Maravars, who were severely outnumbered by the Nadars, were driven out of their homes. The few policemen present at the scene panicked and failed to intervene. The following

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day, extra policemen were sent to the town to ensure order. By early May, police reported that “everything in the town (was) quiet,” although the Nadars expressed fear of trading outside the town. Further, over the following days, rumours spread that Maravars from adjoining villages were gathering in large numbers and planning an attack on the town. The police tended to dismiss these as exaggerated Nadar fears, although they did make some enquiries with village magistrates, who responded that no such plans were being made. During the second half of May, Nadars sent several petitions and telegrams to the government, including one asserting that two thousand Maravars and Pillais had gathered to loot the Sivakasi Nadars. The government ignored these. In late May, the Deputy Magistrate, Ragaviah, warned the District Magistrate, Scott, to station extra policemen in the town, explaining that the riot of 26 April had aggravated the conflict between the Maravars and Nadars of the area. “The differences that had their origin in Sivakasi between the two communities have now spread over the adjoining villages and have developed into a general caste dispute. The effects of these disputes are being felt even in remote villages of the Srivilliputtur taluk,” he wrote.20 Likewise, the Virudupatti inspector wrote that there was “something brewing which may burst out at any moment.”21 These and other warnings were ignored; no extra policemen were stationed, either in the town or in the surrounding villages. Over the last ten days of May and the first week of June, police cases were filed in numerous villages at a radius of 15-30 km from Sivakasi, describing attacks by large groups (ranging from 100 to 2000 people) on Nadars and their houses. Rumours also spread of Kallars coming in from the adjoining Madurai district to join the local Maravars, adding to their strength of numbers. By end-May, according to the Srivilliputtur inspector, “almost all Shanars in villages (were) migrating into Sivakasi and all non-Shanars (were) emigrating out of Sivakasi in expectation of the day appointed for the looting of Sivakasi.”22 The riot took place on the morning of 6 June, a Tuesday, the day of the weekly market—an important day for the Nadars. According to police reports that followed, 5000 Maravars participated in the attack.23 There were few policemen present in the town during the attack. Those present either supported the attackers, or were vastly outnumbered by them and consequently paralysed by fear. Eighteen people died on the spot and three were fatally injured. 886 houses were destroyed. By 3:00 p.m. that afternoon, the fighting had ended, and all the outsiders had left the town. Scattered riots in nearby villages occurred for the next week or so. Groups ranging in size from a dozen to a thousand attacked Nadars, burnt their houses and stole their property, and damaged churches.24 The Nadars successfully defended themselves and retaliated in several of these instances, injuring some of the assailants. It was only by 18 June, nearly two weeks after the Sivakasi riot, that the special armed police and troops brought in from nearby reserves restored order in the region.

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Caste Narratives in Policing The Sivakasi riot marked local and official memory for a long time. Among Nadars, Hardgrave writes, “for the older generation of Sivakasi… the riot is the event by which time is reckoned.”25 The riot consistently entered district gazetteers, police reports, and planning documents of the next thirty years. For colonial administrators of the time, it was a moment of failed policing, one that would guide their resource allocation for the next few decades. But a closer look at the records of the riot does not indicate a failure of police intelligence but instead a failure by the local magistracy to appreciate the gravity of the situation despite receiving police intelligence. As the Special Commissioner investigating the riot, M. Hammick, put it, “the idea that the district officers were absolutely in the dark as to the danger in which Sivakasi was placed is clearly an incorrect one. The local inspector of police clearly knew and realised that there was the greatest danger that Sivakasi would be attacked.”26 The local magistracy’s failure to take the warnings seriously in turn stemmed from how they had characterized Nadars as a caste. In other words, the “failure of policing” in the Sivakasi riot of 1899 points to the extent to which colonial administration relied on objectifications of caste to guide their practice. The Tirunelveli District Magistrate and his police had received plenty of evidence indicating an impending attack. However, they had actively ignored the evidence in accordance with a policy that was dismissive of Nadars as a caste. As mentioned earlier, the colonial police optimised the use of their scare resources in the Madras countryside by relying on objectifications of caste, so that certain castes were policed more, and with greater coercion, than were others. With regard to the Nadars, until the 1890s, colonial administrators schooled in the essential, immutable nature of caste hierarchies viewed Nadar efforts to improve their social and economic position with concern. Although colonial law promised equality for all its subjects, colonial policy in the decades after the Revolt of 1857 and the Queen’s Proclamation that followed it was marked by a strong resistance to interfere in native practice. This often led to governmental accommodation with local hierarchies. Thus, in southern Madras, even as officials were legally bound to respecting Nadar claims to access public spaces, they tended to view Nadars as upstarts who were unwisely upsetting local caste equilibriums. Concomitantly, they also did not take seriously Nadar concerns of being targets of local caste rivalries. For instance, the District Magistrate dismissed one Nadar, who sent a warning telegram of the riot, as “impertinent,” and his telegram as “alarmist.”27 Other warnings too were refracted through the prism of “Nadar sensationalism” to be dismissed as rumour, rather than be treated as intelligence.28 In sum, as the Special Commissioner commented after the riot, “The district magistrate, if he had studied the previous papers in the matter, could

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hardly have avoided realising the danger of the situation, but apparently accepting the proverbial untrustworthiness of all Shanar information, he expressed his opinion that too much had been made of the matter.”29 In the decades after the 1899 Sivakasi riot, local officials, wise by experience, erred on the side of safety rather than bravado in securing Nadar life and property. While riots did occur, rarely was there another such instance where police were completely absent from the scene. But the difference here was not so much improved or even changed methods of policing, but simply that the police narrative about Nadars as a caste had changed. Rather than only seeing them as prone to exaggeration, police also saw their fears as credible and, accordingly, offered them protection. For instance, the year after the riot, the provincial police suggested stationing additional police forces in Aruppukkottai, about 50 km away from Sivakasi, arguing that “Shanar merchants will be attacked by these hereditary dacoits (Maravars) on every possible occasion so that 1, 2 or even 3 Shanars will not dare for some time to move freely about the country with their merchandise, and the Government is bound, I think, to protect them under the circumstances.”30 Equally, police narratives about inherent Maravar criminality sharpened. While colonial administrators had always seen Maravars as a criminal caste, the memories of the 1899 riot served to consolidate these representations in the ensuing years, as seen in the quotation above. When a reorganization of the southern districts was planned in 1909, leading to the constitution of a new district—Ramanathapuram— planners took into account the occurrence of the 1899 riots and “the troublesome and turbulent Maravar population” of the region.31 More drastically, Kallars and Maravars of several villages were notified as “criminal” under the Criminal Tribes Act when it was extended to Madras Presidency in 1911. The impact of the post-1899 narratives about vulnerable Nadars and criminal Maravars on policing is clearly seen in another confrontation that occurred between the two communities in 1918. In September 1918, Madras Presidency witnessed a spate of violence—driven by famine, World War I, and the influenza pandemic.32 While historian David Arnold sees both the 1899 and the 1918 riots as expressions of dacoity driven by rural poverty, the colonial government’s preoccupation with caste led it to characterize both riots almost entirely in terms of unchanging caste hostilities.33 “I should say at once that (the 1918 disturbance) was not connected with the high prices or with the political unrest; but was a recrudescence of the old anti-Shanar feud,” declared the Ramanathapuram District Magistrate A. F. G. Moscardi.34 As in the case of the 1899 riot, the 1918 riot also took place between Nadars and Maravars, but this time in the town of Kamuthi, 50 miles from Sivakasi. Like Sivakasi, Kamuthi was also an urban centre dominated by trading Nadars, surrounded by countryside dominated by Maravars. Like in the case of the 1899 riot, the 1918 riot also occurred on a Tuesday, the day of the weekly market. On

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17 September, around a thousand Maravars from neighbouring villages attacked the town, seeking confrontation with the Nadars and damaging their property. But unlike in 1899, police response to the attack was decisive, thorough, and fairly successful in keeping fatalities to a minimum. In large part, this was because of the haunting memories of 1899, which led the local magistracy to take very seriously Nadar warnings of a potential riot in the days leading up to the event. For instance, upon receiving just one letter from a local pastor warning of expected looting, the district magistrate met with other local officials, Nadars, and policemen, to discuss preventive measures. Extra, armed police forces were stationed in the town, and the magistrate was prepared to handle any disturbance. For several days following the Kamuthi attack, the magistrate responded to information of other imminent clashes in the region by deploying police forces across villages, sometimes “unnecessarily” in his opinion, so that further riots were averted.35 The colonial police had effectively reinvented their narrative on Nadars and consolidated their image of criminal Maravars in the years after 1899.

Policing after the Riot The colonial state retaliated to instances of popular violence, like the Sivakasi riot of 1899 and the Kamuthi riot of 1918, with unequivocal measures geared to prevent any recurrence of similar violence. The most obvious of these measures was the use of fire on participants in riots. But the state’s response to popular violence did not end at the moment of police firing. Rather, it was a prolonged one that included 1) extra policing, discussed in this section, and 2) judicial retribution, discussed in the next. Both of these measures cast long shadows on colonial subjects’ everyday lives, but failed to garner the immediate public attention—in newspapers or legislative house debates—that spectacular violence did.36 Section 15 of the Indian Police Act, 1861 authorized a local government to declare any area under its authority “to be in a disturbed or dangerous state” and to quarter additional police forces in that area for a specified, but limited, time period.37 These additional forces were commonly referred to as the punitive police. In Sivakasi and its environs, a punitive police force was stationed after the 1899 riots. Unlike the regular police, who were typically only armed with wooden staves for their surveillance and investigation work, the punitive police held firearms, did not participate in routine policing activities, and were instead to be “thoroughly drilled and work as Military Police.”38 In fact, it was only once the punitive force, numbering 300 men, was installed that the military, which had been brought in after the riot, withdrew from the Sivakasi area. Although punitive forces were intended to be stationed temporarily (for two to three years), their tenure was

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often extended through multiple executive orders. When the 1918 riots broke out in Kamuthi, almost twenty years after the 1899 Sivakasi riots, the Sivakasi punitive force was still in operation in the region.39 The long life of punitive police forces owed to the Orientalist assumption that a conflict had been triggered not by a specific cause but rather because of unchanging relationships between specific communities. In its request to London for the sanctioning of the police force following the 1899 riot, the Government of India argued that “the ill-feeling between the Shanars and the Maravars has only been temporarily suppressed and not extinguished, and that it is necessary that a considerable additional Police force should be located where disturbances are likely to recur.”40 The Orientalist myth of a neutral colonial state that stood above native communities to impartially settle their disputes influenced not only the duration but also the staffing of punitive police forces. In addition to assuming that caste identity had led to the outbreak of a particular instance of violence, colonial administrators assumed that caste identity could not but lead to violence at any time. Accordingly, the punitive police force had more European inspectors and head constables than native policemen compared to the regular police force. Furthermore, there were restrictions on who among the native population could join the force. In the case of the Sivakasi riots, it was forbidden that the force include anyone from Tirunelveli district, or Nadars or Maravars from anywhere. The cost of the punitive police force was to be borne by all or some of the inhabitants of the disturbed area, through a tax levy. The force was not cheap, largely because it had a far higher ratio of European officers (who were paid higher salaries and housed in better quarters than were native policemen) as compared to the regular police.41 The punitive police force initially sanctioned after the 1899 Sivakasi riot cost Rs. 65,259 annually, to be levied from the residents of around 600 villages. Nadars were not exempted from paying their share of the punitive police tax. As the Police Commissioner argued, “the Shanars, although the principal sufferers at this time, have undoubtedly by their aggressive conduct brought the present troubles that they have suffered in a measure upon themselves, and it is very doubtful whether by exempting them we should not rather encourage the continuance of the present bitter feelings than allay them.”42 Likewise, following the 1918 riot, the District Magistrate, A. F. G. Moscardi, advocated the placement of a punitive police, writing that “both Shanars and Maravars have put themselves in the wrong and have combined to prove that they cannot be left to themselves.”43 The colonial state’s altered perception of Nadars as victims of caste violence following the 1899 riot had not changed the more fundamental fact that Nadars were colonial subjects, lacking the rights of full-fledged citizens. To that extent, they, alongside the Maravars, felt the might of the state’s police apparatus descending on them in the aftermath of the riots.

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The prohibitive costs, if not the impossibility, of determining individual participants in such riots meant that people not involved in it might still wind up paying the levy.44 After the 1899 Sivakasi riot, the Madras government clarified that no “class of persons” would be exempted from shouldering the cost of the punitive police force.45 A couple of years later, the Madurai District Magistrate asked that the force be disbanded from at least Tirumangalam Taluk, since it had only been slightly affected by the violence and “for such disturbances as did occur the people have been sufficiently punished by the payment of tax up to date.”46 The government, however, rejected the suggestion, since the possibility of future disturbances in the wider area was not yet ruled out. The cost of bureaucratic errors on individuals was also occasionally high, at least for limited durations. For instance, in the initial list of villages drawn up to pay the punitive police tax after the 1918 Kamuthi riot, the village Pannaikulam was incorrectly spelt as Ponnakulam, which, unfortunately, was the name of a different village. Likewise, another village called Pethanendal was included in the list, but there were three villages of that name in the district and local police were unable to determine which of them they meant to include in the list. “Two of them contain(ed) no Shanar or Maravar houses, but in the third there (were) only two Marava houses,” whose inhabitants did not participate in the riot.47

Vacant Villages The installation of the punitive police and the concomitant imposition of the police tax financially affected everyone in a region already impacted by violence, as seen above. The second strand of state action i.e. delivering judicial punishment to participants in riots, had to be more selective. But how could the judicial apparatus assign criminal intent and action in a riot that involved the participation of hundreds or thousands of people? Shahid Amin has famously answered this in the context of the nationalist Chauri Chaura riot of 1922 by revealing how the subaltern Approver’s ostensibly independent testimony, crucial in identifying the participants of the riot, was itself a product of judicial discourse.48 In riots classified by colonial administrators as communal, the category of community—whether religious or caste—provided a far easier lens through which to identify suspects. Community identity was particularly crucial in incidents like the Sivakasi riot of 1899 and the Kamuthi riot of 1918, whose participants came from across villages. Local, personal knowledge of participants was impossible in these instances, and caste filled the vacuum. Policemen largely followed two related methods in apprehending and charging suspects. One, they targeted Maravars, since the riots had been classified as pure caste disputes, their more complex socio-economic dimensions

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notwithstanding. Two, they relied heavily on Nadar testimony in identifying and charging suspects, since Nadars had, in large measure, been termed the victims of the riots. The spatial configuration of Indian villages, where certain villages were dominated by certain caste groups, aided police identification of Maravar suspects and Nadar witnesses.49 In addition, it allowed police to concentrate their efforts in physically apprehending suspects. After the 1899 and 1918 riots occurred, special police forces as well as military units were sent to the disturbed areas to quell the disturbances. These forces targeted villages where Maravars were dominant castes to capture its men. This was quite a brutal process, as seen in the words of the Ramanathapuram district magistrate, quoted below: The method adopted generally was to take out a sufficient force and surround any Marava village which was known to be the residence of men who had taken part in any reported offence. This had to be done at night, for no men were to be found in the villages in daylight; and in some cases, the villages were found empty even at night… A village having thus been surrounded in the small hours of the morning, the men were made to line up at daybreak, and those who were wanted by the police were then arrested. In this way large numbers of the more desperate characters were made prisoners; so much so that some of the sub-jails were seriously over-crowded, and I had to get permission from the InspectorGeneral of Jails to send the surplus to the Madura District Jail.50

The number of people arrested by the colonial police for possible participation in these caste riots was indeed staggering. In the police crack-down that followed the Sivakasi riot of 6 June 1899, 870 people had been arrested by 30 July 1899. By the end of year, a whopping 1958 people had been arrested.51 This number also explains the point in the magistrate’s description, that the villages were empty during the daytime. Marava men, at least according to official records, had left their homes in these weeks immediately after the riot to hustle people across villages to contribute money to pay for the extensive judicial proceedings that would follow.52 In this, they appear to have been only partially successful. By the end of the year, of the 1958 arrested, 552 had been convicted of the crime, with seven being sentenced to death.53 But even someone who got acquitted by the lower courts in a case like this may not have seen the last of his travails. Following the 1918 riot, several Maravars acquitted by the lower courts were convicted on appeal by government prosecutors in the higher court at Madras city. The lack of judicial consensus in these cases points to the difficulties of reconciling caste profiling with penal procedure, as well as to the tensions between policing—which relied heavily on caste objectifications, and later stages of judicial procedure—which could not as easily do the same. For example, in one case from 1920, the Ramnad Sessions court acquitted eleven men, all Thevar, who had been accused of participating in the 1918 Kamuthi riot. The

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Sessions Judge concluded that “the riot could not be the outcome of an interclass feud as that cause (was) too remote.”54 He also raised evidentiary issues, such as the soundness of the police identification parades that had been held and discrepancies in names between those charged and those recognized by witnesses. On appeal, the Madras High Court overturned the decision, convicting ten of the eleven acquitted men to three years’ rigorous imprisonment each. The High Court claimed that the political significance of the riot outweighed the inadequacy of evidence (for example, the faulty identification parades, the discrepancies in names etc.), in effect upbraiding the lower court judge for being narrowly legalistic. Further, while the lower court had pointed to the broader unrest and economic distress of the period to question the certainty of a caste conflict, the High Court subsumed economic distress into what it saw as the overarching narrative—that of caste identity: … there may have been two motives operating on those concerned, the enmity which undoubtedly exists between the Marawar and Nadar castes and the economic distress in the district of Ramnad at the time of the occurrence, which no doubt rendered persons of the class concerned more prone to lawless conduct.55

In the context of difficulty in identifying participants in riots for the purposes of judicial conviction, witness testimony acquired inordinate significance. My concern here is not whether testimony was biased by caste or not, but rather with how local politics attributed meaning to testimony as heavily determined by caste. On 5 June 1899, the day before the Sivakasi riot, a group of 500 Maravars had attacked the Nadars of Karisalkulam village, about 40 km away. According to Nadar testimony in the trials that followed, the village Konars—another local caste group also in conflict with the Nadars on the matter of caste precedence—had aided the Maravars in the attacks. Unsurprisingly, Konars objected to the identification, claiming that it had been motivated by past animosity. All the same, a few Konars of the village were arrested and convicted based on Nadar testimony, ensuring the extension of the dispute between the two caste groups by several more years.56 In another incident that took place on 8 June 1899, two days after the Sivakasi riot, a group of 2000 people, across castes, was reported to have attacked the Nadars of Chinneyapuram village, which boasted a flourishing weekly market. The crowd was reported to have destroyed houses, looted property, sexually assaulted Nadar women, and left three Nadar men dead. Nadars of the village identified over 300 people as among the attackers; many of these men were convicted and sent to prison. Three years later, seeking to take advantage of the coronation of Edward VII as Emperor of India, around fifty residents of an adjoining village petitioned the government (unsuccessfully) to pardon one of the imprisoned men. According to the petitioners, the Nadars had “wantonly implicated many innocent people” with

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whom they had personal grievances, but the police had taken them at their word because they were the victims in the riots.57 Sangama Naick was one such innocent person, who had already been in jail for two years, they said. The petitioners sought his release as he had a large family to support and “no one to look after his household affairs.”58 The absence of Sangama Naick from his house and family for an extended period of time, whether justly or unjustly, brings me to the last aspect of how colonial response to communal riots impacted colonised societies. When the military and special police forces hunted down Maravars of the region after the 1899 and 1918 riots, they arrested many, but not all suspects. Those who escaped arrest did so by absconding, sometimes for several years on end. For instance, Ponnusami Tevan and Ramachandra Tevan, both charged for their role in the 1899 Sivakasi riot, absconded for at least four years each to evade police arrest.59 The absconding of accused persons after serious crimes was a common feature in the Tamil countryside through the first half of the twentieth century.60 But its implication on life in a community was magnified in cases where all the males of a caste or village were charged in a crime. This was prolonged violence to livelihood engendered by the force of colonial law. Furthermore, this was distinctly gender- and classbased violence. Thevars, who were classified as criminal communities in colonial discourse, were stereotyped as vagrant, unable to practice settled agriculture, and, hence, to be good subjects.61 Colonial administrators condemned Thevar inability to be diligent laborers, even as they wondered at their ability to travel great distances in their “traditional” criminal pursuits. But to the extent to which the trope of the absent Thevar male was a reality, it drew on a complex of things, including the gendered nature of popular violence and its policing. Moreover, in a context where men were absconding to evade arrest, the cost of managing homes and livelihoods must have fallen on women—a different sort of violence. This cost is hardly visible in governmental archives, but there are some traces we can see. Touring the affected areas following the 1918 Kamuthi riot, District Magistrate Moscardi commented that “if it were to rain, it would relieve the situation, for the men would have to come in and do the work. But they have nothing to do. When I go to a Marava village, I find only women, and they are friendly enough and would be very glad to see the men back.”62 The impact of colonial law and its violence on subject lives was often easy to miss, definitely hard to measure, and was by no means limited to those who directly confronted state violence. The story of modern policing is in part a global one, tracing back to new national economic formations in Europe, and to Europe’s imperial expansion in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia, from the eighteenth century onwards.63 But it would be historiographical violence to leave hidden the local stories—of harassment and resistance—that are integrally linked with this larger narrative of

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state violence. Paradoxically, media and film representations from the Tamil region overwhelmingly present stories of caste-based violence and affliction as purely local stories. In these narratives, caste is the primordial Indian evil, stubbornly resisting the modern state’s attempts to erase it. The task for the historian, then, is not only to shine a light on local stories but also to illuminate their links to the global stories. As we recover glimpses of subaltern history from governmental records—one of the primary archival sites for historians of colonial India, we also need to challenge judicial narratives’ claims of objectivity to expose their role in reproducing local caste violence.

Notes 1

For a recent synthetic study, see L. Edwards, N. Penn and J. Winter, eds., The Cambridge World History of Violence Vol. 4, 1800 to the present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

2

R. Cover, “Violence and the Word,” The Yale Law Journal 95, 8 (1986); V. Das and D. Poole eds, Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004); P. Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

3

V. Bailey ed., Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981); C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2018); D. Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).

4

J. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

5

Great Britain, First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire as to the Best Means of Establishing an Efficient Constabulary Force in the Counties of England and Wales (London, 1839); S. Petrow, Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 1870-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); A. Prakash, “Colonial Techniques in the Imperial Capital: The Prefecture of Police and the Surveillance of North Africans in Paris, 1925-circa 1970,” French Historical Studies 36, 3 (2013); S. Razack, “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine,” Feminist Legal Studies 28, 1 (2020). There is also, of course, a large literature on the policing of African-Americans in USA.

6

E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in EighteenthCentury England (London: Allen Lane, 1975).

7

P. Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); T. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); U. S. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

8

E. Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also N. Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

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9

P. Brooks and P. Gewirtz, eds, Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

10

E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). There is a large literature on objectification of caste including, notably, N. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

11

B. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

12

R. Kumar, Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900-1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021). The force was predominantly native at all but the highest echelons.

13

For the colonial construction of the category of the communal riot (which in the South Asian context refers to sectarianism), see G. Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).

14

R. Hardgrave Jr., The Nadars of Tamilnad: The political culture of a community in change (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969). As per today’s usage, this paper uses Nadars to refer to the caste, except in direct quotations.

15

M. N. Srinivas, Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).

16

S. Blackburn, “The Kallars: A Tamil ‘Criminal Tribe’ Reconsidered,” South Asia 1, 1 (1978).

17

N. Dirks, The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For a discussion of the affinity between bandit and king in Tamil poetic imagination in the context of the Kallar, see D. Shulman, “On South Indian Bandits and Kings,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, 3 (1980): 283–306.

18

D. Arnold, “Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras, 1860-1940,” Journal of Peasant Studies 6, 2 (1979): 140–167.

19

The civil case between the Nadars and the Ramanathapuram Raja on the Kamuthi temple would prove to be a lengthy one, lasting over a decade and going on appeal all the way to the Privy Council in London.

20

“Report of the Special Commissioner on Disturbances in Madura and Tinnevelly,” 15 Aug. 1899, 19–20, in IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534, British Library (Hereafter BL).

21

Special Commissioner’s Report, p. 22, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

22

Special Commissioner’s Report, p. 21.

23

Madras, Report on the Administration of the Police of the Madras Presidency 1899 (hereafter MPAR).

24

Nadars had converted in large numbers to Christianity, in protest of their caste status.

25

Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad, p. 111.

26

Special Commissioner’s Report, p. 33, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

27

Special Commissioner’s Report, p.50, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

28

Special Commissioner’s Report, pp. 23, 50, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

29

Special Commissioner’s Report, p. 19, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534. Emphasis mine.

30

GO 2113 W, PWD, 1 Aug. 1900, Tamil Nadu Archives (hereafter TNA).

31

“Madras District Reconstitution,” IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 948, File 2437, BL.

32

D. Arnold, “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India 1918,” Past & Present 84 (1979): 111–145.

33

Arnold, “Dacoity and Rural Crime.”

34

GO 2550 Press, Judicial, 15 Nov. 1918, TNA.

35

GO 2550 Press, Judicial, 15 Nov. 1918, TNA.

36

Literature of a later period captured some of these experiences. See V. Ramamoorthy, “Irulappasami and the Twenty One He-Goats” in G. Krishnankutty ed., Ambai (New Delhi: Katha, 1999).

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37

The Police Act. Sec 15 was the result of an 1895 amendment to the 1861 Act.

38

Special Commissioner’s Report, p. 2, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

39

After the 1918 riot, an additional punitive force of 58 men was installed in Kamuthi.

40

Letter from Government of India to the Secretary of State in London dated 22 Feb. 1900 in IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

41

Special Commissioner’s Report, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534. For example, quarters were built for the European officers of the special police at Aruppukkottai at a cost around Rs. 5000—considerably higher than the amounts spent on housing native policemen. G.O. 256-7 W, PWD (B&R), 24 Jan. 1902, TNA.

42

Special Commissioner’s Report, p. 2, IOR: L/ P&J/ 6/ 534.

43

GO 2550 Press, Judicial, 15 Nov. 1918, TNA.

44

There is a large literature on bureaucratic violence in South Asia. Among others, see V. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); A. Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence, and poverty in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

45

GO 2017-18, Judicial, 1899, TNA.

46

GO 389 P, Judicial, 17 Mar. 1903, TNA.

47

The villages were subsequently dropped from the list. GO 658, Home Judicial, 8 Mar. 1920, TNA.

48

S. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).

49

M. N. Srinivas, The Dominant Caste and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). Maravars were dominant castes in parts of southern Madras Presidency.

50

Letter from Moscardi to Government of Madras dated 1 Nov. 1918, GO 2550 Press, Judicial, 15 Nov. 1918, TNA. Emphasis mine.

51

MPAR 1899.

52

The same narrative, of Maravars carrying on “a campaign of terrorism and extortion in other villages,” was used following the 1918 riot as well. MPAR 1918, par. 16.

53

MPAR 1899.

54

GO 1838, Law (General), 7 Nov. 1921, TNA. Thevar is the broader caste umbrella under which Maravars fell.

55

High Court Judgment, in GO 1838, Law, 1921, TNA.

56

R. Dis. 27/1905, 20 Mar. 1905, Ramnad collectorate records, District Record Centre Madurai.

57

GO 672, Judicial, 21 Apr. 1902, TNA.

58

GO 672, Judicial, 21 Apr. 1902, petition dated 22 Mar. 1902, TNA.

59

GO 1587 ms, Judicial, 1 Oct. 1904, TNA.

60

In another example, all the Nadars of Veerakanjipuram village absconded after a conflict with the Naickers of the neighbouring hamlet in 1945. IOR: L/P&J/7/10164, British Library.

61

A. Pandian, Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

62

Demi Official from Moscardi to Chief Secretary to Government of Madras dated 30 Sep. 1918, GO 2550 Press, Judicial, 15 Nov. 1918, TNA.

63

M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007).

vacant villages: policing riots in colonial india 167

Works Cited Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Arnold, David. “Dacoity and Rural Crime in Madras, 1860-1940.” Journal of Peasant Studies 6, 2 (1979): 140–167. ———. “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India 1918.” Past & Present 84 (1979): 111–145. ———. Police Power and Colonial Rule, Madras, 1859-1947. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. Bailey, Victor, ed. Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981. Blackburn, Stuart. “The Kallars: A Tamil ‘Criminal Tribe’ Reconsidered.” South Asia 1, 1 (1978): 38–51. Brooks, Peter and Paul Gewirtz, eds. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Cohn, Bernard. An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Cover, Robert. “Violence and the Word.” The Yale Law Journal 95, 8 (1986): 1601–1629. Das, Veena and Deborah Poole, eds. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004. Dirks, Nicholas. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Edwards, Louise, Nigel Penn and Jay Winter, eds. The Cambridge World History of Violence Vol. 4, 1800 to the present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Emsley, Clive. Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900, 5th ed. New York: Routledge, 2018. Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-78. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2007. Great Britain. First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire as to the Best Means of Establishing an Efficient Constabulary Force in the Counties of England and Wales. London, 1839. Gupta, Akhil. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Hardgrave Jr., Robert. The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969. Hay, Douglas, Peter Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson, eds. Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Allen Lane, 1975. Hussain, Nasser. The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Kolsky, Elizabeth. Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Kumar, Radha. Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900-1975. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

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Mehta, Uday Singh. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in nineteenth-century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Metcalf, Thomas. Ideologies of the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pandey, Gyanendra. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. Pandian, Anand. Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Petrow, Stefan. Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, 1870-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Prakash, Amit. “Colonial Techniques in the Imperial Capital: The Prefecture of Police and the Surveillance of North Africans in Paris, 1925-circa 1970.” French Historical Studies 36, 3 (2013): 479–510. Ramamoorthy, Vela. “Irulappasami and the Twenty One He-Goats.” In Ambai, edited by Gita Krishnankutty. New Delhi: Katha, 1999. Razack, Sherene. “Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine.” Feminist Legal Studies 28, 1 (2020): 1–20. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Scott, James. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Shulman, David. “On South Indian Bandits and Kings.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, 3 (1980): 283–306. Srinivas, M. N. Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. ———. The Dominant Caste and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Thompson, E. P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975. Zamindar, Vazira. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York:Columbia University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 7

The Neoplatonic Renaissance from the Thames to the Ganges Jos Gommans

Abstract This unabashedly intuitive essay introduces Neoplatonism as a new category in global intellectual history. It highlights one particular moment in time when Neoplatonism became the cutting-edge, avant-garde intellectual force in both the Latinate West and the Persianate East. More specifically, by comparing Stuart England and Mughal India the essay uncovers a hitherto silent cord of commensurable royal courts stretching from the Thames to the Ganges. During a long sixteenth century (c. 1450-1650), this courtly continuum was the dazzling stage of a global Neoplatonic Renaissance. Whereas in Stuart England it showed primarily in emblematic fiction, in Mughal India it was an imperial dream come true.

Keywords: Neoplatonism; Global History; Renaissance; Mughals; Stuarts



When the sea breathes, this is called steam.



When the steam condenses, this is called a cloud.



When drops begin to fall, the cloud becomes rain,



and the rain becomes the river, and the river finally returns to the sea.1



Abd al-Rahman Jami (1414-1492)

In this essay I would like to introduce Neoplatonism as a new category in global intellectual history. The term Neoplatonism was coined in the eighteenth century to make a distinction between Platonic thought and the ideas of a group of philosophers who followed the lead of the third-century philosopher Plotinus; the group included his student and biographer Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus, to name only its four main representatives. More than the earlier Platonists, and even more so than the great philosopher himself, these late-Hellenic followers of Plato commented on his thinking, further systemised it, and aligned it to mystical cults oriented towards Pythagoras, Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus. From the third to

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the fifth century, all these elements together generated a seething Neoplatonic juncture which was to have a tremendous impact on the post-Classical world of Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world. Although an almost Alexandrian library has been written on Neoplatonism, so far, no comprehensive connective or comparative analysis has been made of these three geographical branches. In this essay, I will pinpoint one particular moment in time when, after centuries of more hidden influences, Neoplatonism once again, and for about one long sixteenth century, became the cutting-edge, avant-garde intellectual force in both the Latinate West and the Persianate East. As we will see, as a sophisticated system of thought, Neoplatonism was primarily an intellectual and elite preoccupation that was centred at the royal courts. Hence, we are dealing with a Neoplatonic Renaissance that strongly affected a courtly continuum stretching at least from the Thames to the Ganges.2 Obviously, I am all too aware that discussing a Renaissance of such global proportions within the limits of a brief essay is very much a bold, if not imprudent attempt at the impossible. Yet it should be attempted. There is no other way for the global historian than to naively brave the borders of the ever-expanding fields and subfields that one way or the other have dealt with Neoplatonic thought. Almost by necessity, the result will be about its shifting definitions and meanings: an histoire croisée through time and space, from its ancient beginnings to the Renaissance, from the Latinate West to the Persianate East. Lacking any specific philosophical or philological expertise on the topic, I cannot claim that one or the other version of Neoplatonism is more or less authentic or true. For the present purpose, the discursive dimension is more important than authenticity. It is my contention that the ongoing argumentation about Neoplatonism throughout time and space has been constitutive of its meaning.3 The universal, cosmographical claim of Neoplatonism makes it an important topic for the premodern history of globalization in the widest sense of that term, encompassing both global history and global literary studies, the two main disciplinary perspectives of the present volume. It will show, though, that Neoplatonism has been more thoroughly studied as a literary than as a historical influence. Beyond these literary studies, which often take a national-linguistic perspective, this essay aims to contribute to what should one day become a long-durée history of world literature that goes beyond the modern nation-state to uncover coevalness between diverse literary cultures in eras prior to our own, sometimes even creating new ecumenes or cosmopoleis due to intensive moments of imperial conquest, global interaction and/or translation. What is more, by studying Neoplatonism, the invitation is not only to compare but to connect world literature in its local and global historical context. In my view, we need to recognize that for many centuries Neoplatonism, in all its different avatars, was a dominant world-making force,

the neoplatonic renaissance from the thames to the ganges 171

which as a silent cord connected the Latinate and Persianate courts.4 Despite the obvious differences between Stuart England and Mughal India, we should be able to read authors from both regions not only in relation to their specific locality but also in an awareness that they shared “a common ancestry as cousins springing from the same classical sources and shaped by mutual contact with Islamicate societies.”5 Opting for the term Neoplatonism instead of Platonism is to reflect the overwhelming dominance of the Neoplatonist interpretation of Plato’s thinking both in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and both in the Latinate and the Persianate world.6 In this hypothetical essay, I will therefore basically discuss the main characteristics and manifestations of what I see as a so far ignored, global Renaissance of Neoplatonic thought.7 What was it all about? Is there any unity behind all the diversity? How did it manifest itself at its two geographical extremes: later Tudor and early Stuart England and Mughal India? And to start with: why has it been ignored for so long?

Schwärmerei against Modernity There is no single, all-encompassing field of Neoplatonic studies. The topic is divided, first of all, along the lines of the three main “civilizational” regions of Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic world. Especially for the European and Islamic cases, there is further fragmentation due to disciplinary and regional specialization. In the West, philosophical studies focus on the Classical, Medieval or Renaissance periods. Classical scholars in particular enjoy a splendid isolation from other fields that they consider to be either beyond their philological grasp or too far removed from what they perceive as the original canon. There are many other disciplines that show some very intense engagement with Neoplatonism but apply the term much more widely to describe a combination of philosophical and cultural phenomena which, indeed, do not necessarily refer to the original works of the founders. Apart from the various regional and temporal specializations, the main fields are art history, literary studies, religious history, intellectual history and, more recently, the history of Western esotericism. Of course, this raises the question of what the term actually implies when, for example, art historians, literary scholars or scholars of the Islamic world use it beyond the Classical paradigm. If the connection with the Classical texts is watered down, what else makes Neoplatonism tick as a useful category for those fields beyond late Classical philosophy and to what extent is the term transferable at all from one field to the other? Obviously, this important question can hardly be answered as long as the various sub-fields

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do not engage with each other. To take up this issue in earnest would require an in-depth analysis of the use of the term Neoplatonism in all these fields. Although this would certainly be a worthwhile exercise, it is also far beyond the format of the present essay. All that I will attempt here is to test whether the term can be fruitfully applied to two apparently very distant cases—England and India—at one particular moment in time: the long sixteenth century. First, let me explain what gives me the confidence to suggest that it will. It was about a decade ago that I became interested in Neoplatonic thought. Until then I had primarily worked on the early modern history of South Asia and was in particular looking at that region’s long-neglected connections with the outside world, in particular with Central Asia and Southeast Asia. In doing so, and being a decent child of my time, I obviously wanted to avoid the trap of Orientalism, or any other essentialism of that kind, and tended to highlight the “surprisingly” modern features of an early modern South Asia, in particular in a more material sense. Hence, thanks to the contributions of many of my colleagues, we have arrived at a stage where South Asia is part of a much wider world typified by sophisticated multiple modernities. The understandable urge to take South Asia’s history out of its former historiographical isolation made revisionist historians stress South Asia’s part in what seemed to be a shared experience of modernity characterized by specific South Asian avatars of, for example, growing individualism, secularization, nationalism, capitalism, empiricism or secularization. As the discussion on the Great Divergence shows most emphatically, such a derivative search for a modernity package in non-Western societies tends to reduce the history of these societies to the issue of what went wrong with them. One other disadvantage of the modernization agenda, and one that is of more immediate concern for the present essay, is that it tended to downplay the “non-modern” ingredients of South Asian and other non-Western societies. Topics that were considered typically “premodern”—in particular of a religious or philosophical nature—became neglected by historians and were seen as rather essentialist, sometimes romantic preoccupations of an outdated, naïve generation of orientalist, colonial and nationalist scholars. What made it worse in the South Asian scenario was that contemporary politics were—and still are—deeply affected by communal tensions which makes religion such an explosive topic. Besides, since many of the post-Independence South Asian historians were grounded in Marxist thinking, religion and ideas were often considered to be of secondary, merely legitimizing importance—“opium for the people” as a good Marxist would have it—or, at least, the outcome of material life. Something similar happened in the case of Islamic studies, where the topic of religion has been captured by a coalition of orthodox normative believers and defensive secular progressives aimed at stripping Islam of its apparently

the neoplatonic renaissance from the thames to the ganges 173

non-modern, “superstitious” and “magic” elements. The latter would include such very Neoplatonic “pseudo-sciences” as lettrism, astrology or geomancy; all those elements that were, on the one hand, considered outside the normative discourse of creed, scripture and law, and on the other hand, had served so well in that “othering” Orientalist discourse against a more modern West. As a result, in both South Asian and Islamic historiographies, the overall tendency has been to either neglect religion and philosophy, or to render it more acceptable by making it more modern.8 Interestingly, this seemed to repeat a much earlier development that had happened to religious studies in the West and had led to the emergence of a new discipline focussing on a tradition of Western esotericism, which studied “rejected”, non-modern knowledge in Western culture. The scholarly emancipation of all this occult knowledge had already started in the 1920s encouraged by art historians attached to the Warburg Institute. This was followed in the 1960s and ‘70s by a new wave of cultural historians who followed the lead of another Warburgian scholar, Dame Frances Yates, to study the forgotten “Hermetic tradition” of the Renaissance. As stressed by the major spokesperson of the budding field of Western esotericism, Wouter Hanegraaff, Yates’ work caught the Zeitgeist and continued to ride the wave of countercultural dissent within the academy and outside it.9 Unfortunately, despite the efforts of Yates and later in particular Faivre and Hanegraaff himself, the field remains relatively marginal to the Humanities as a whole as it continues to be associated with the Schwärmerei of overly romantic, if not religionist, scholars looking for alternatives to a predominantly rationalistic modernity.10 Once again, it seems that the only way to make this “esotericism” more relevant is to associate it with modernity, either presenting it as its essential “other”, or as a crucial precursor to it, as in the case of the so-called Yates thesis.11 Very much part of this scholarly disenchantment myself, I became more aware of these so-called esoteric ingredients of Western and Islamic societies when studying the seventeenth-century artistic interactions between the Netherlands and India.12 In the context of my research I was struck by the appearance of Plato in a sixteenth-century Mughal miniature. In fact, he showed up, not as the distinguished, serious philosopher of the Dutch gymnasium, but as a rather weird magician, charming the animals in the wilderness by playing the organ. It took a while before I came to realize that the European image of a more “serious” Plato was the result of the Western disenchantment described above. Was it the outcome of a related process in which Greek civilization had been claimed by the West and thus had to be separated from its Egyptian and perhaps also Indian ingredients?13 Would it be conceivable that, as a result of the one or the other, I was no longer able to see the connections between the European and the Indian Plato? In any event, what was “my” Plato doing in the midst of these very “exotic”

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Illustration 1: Madhu Khanazad (attr.), “Plato charms the wild animals with music” in Akbar’s Khamsa of Nizami, British Library

the neoplatonic renaissance from the thames to the ganges 175

Indian surroundings? What or who brought him there? What happened to him that caused him to become depicted as a magician? It also raised the question of what happened to the legacy of Plato in the West, in other words, what happened to Neoplatonism, the philosophical tradition that had claimed his legacy so emphatically? These questions brought me to the main objective of this essay: to what extent Plato’s legacy of Neoplatonism can be seen as a transcultural phenomenon, a global category that encompasses both the European and the Indian images of Plato? Before dealing with this question, though, we should first ask ourselves how Neoplatonism became part of the European and Indian worlds.

The Neoplatonic Cosmopolis At the risk of being too rash here, one could say that in various guises Neoplatonism was still strong in the early European Middle Ages but that it was gradually replaced by Aristotelean thought after about 1200, then revived during the early Renaissance, when it gave rise to and became part of what can be seen more broadly as an “Emblematic Worldview.”14 Neoplatonism was undermined again in the seventeenth century due to the disenchantment engendered by growing rationalism and empiricism, after which it disappeared from the courts and the universities but managed to live on in the arts. A crucial moment for European Neoplatonism is the Quattrocento, when, under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, Marsilio Ficino translated a wide range of Platonic, Neoplatonic and Hermetic texts from Greek into Latin. Ficino and his many followers considered themselves revivalists of a lost ancient wisdom tradition that centred around Plato. According to Hanegraaff, Ficino is at the origin of a non-institutional current of religious speculation, the development of which can be traced in European culture through the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century, where “Plato” serves as a general label for a much wider complex of practices and speculations largely inherited from the Hellenistic culture of Late Antiquity.15 Following John Walbridge, a scholar of Islamic Neoplatonism, Hanegraaff coins the latter “Platonic Orientalism” as it fittingly indicates how these Hellenic thinkers highlighted the oriental ancestry of their wisdom, preserved in a so-called philosophia perennis going back to epic figures like the Persian Zoroaster and the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus. In the entirely different, but equally sophisticated, context of Spenser Studies, William Junker has recently described sixteenth-century European Platonism as a doctrinally elastic programme that stretched backwards to encompass the various ancient and medieval strands of Platonisms ranging from Plato himself, the Neoplatonists, to (Pseudo-)Dionysius the Areopagite, the Christian fathers, and the School of Chartres, and including Pythagorean and Orphic rites, Kabbala and the

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ancient Egyptian wisdom of the Corpus Hermeticum.16 This extravagant lineage is itself part of the Platonic ecumenical practice of creating unity, not by reducing its many elements to one type, but by synthesizing its many kinds of elements into one whole. Although Junker calls the synthesis Platonic, I would prefer to use the term Neoplatonic. Despite the fact that more and more intellectuals at this stage were able to read Plato’s original oeuvre, it was not Platonism in general but Neoplatonism in particular—i.e. the systemic and inclusivist Neoplatonist interpretation of Plato— that was revived in the Quattrocento and via Ficino c.s. spread across Europe, more in particular across it’s royal courts. In other words, the revival of various occult traditions in the long sixteenth century can and should be labelled for what it was: a Neoplatonic Renaissance that went back to the legacy of Hanegraaff’s and Walbridge’s late-Hellenic Platonic Orientalism which had dominated the Eastern Mediterranean of the early centuries CE. Moving to the East, it makes even more sense to stress the Neoplatonic characteristic of Plato’s legacy: it was not Plato’s original work, but the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato as well as the Neoplatonists’ own works that had the greatest influence in the Islamic world. As in its European branch, Neoplatonism was scattered but also found some new inspiration in the works of Islamic philosophers, the most important being Kindi (c. 801-c. 873) and Farabi (c. 872-c. 950). Also similar to the West, they could profit from a wave of translations, which in the Islamic case happened much earlier, during the ninth century under the patronage of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, in particular under al-Ma’mun (r. 833-842), to whom the great Aristotle had appeared in a dream. Indeed, this wave of Greek-Arabic translations primarily opened up the Aristotelian oeuvre and it is quite telling that the two most important Neoplatonic works that became widely available—the Enneads of Plotinus and the Elements of Theology by Proclus—were also attributed to Aristotle.17 As much as in the European Middle Ages, it was far from crystal clear whether a text had an Aristotelian or a Platonic origin, in either case it attracted primarily Neoplatonic comments and interpretations. After these promising Arabic beginnings, around the end of the first millennium Islamic Neoplatonism continued to have a fairly dispersed existence until it really started to thrive in the late twelfth century under the impetus of Sufism and, more directly, through Illuminationism, the novel but also distinctly Neoplatonic philosophy of the Persian philosopher Suhrawardi (1154-1191). Neoplatonism became really big in the fourteenth- to sixteenth-century eastern Islamic world under Turco-Mongolian and Timurid rule.18 As had happened already in the earlier stages of Hellenic Neoplatonism, but was now happening much more intensively, these most eastern branches of Neoplatonism were stimulated even further by Indic monist philosophy, the latter becoming more accessible through another

the neoplatonic renaissance from the thames to the ganges 177

wave of translations, this time not from Greek into Arabic under the Abbasids, or from Greek into Latin under the De’ Medicis, but from Sanskrit into Persian under the Mughals.19 As I will argue in the latter part of the essay, for the first generation of Mughal conquerors, the Neoplatonist philosopher-king was not just a literary ideal but became an immanent reality! Meanwhile, the intellectual connections with Latinate Europe were both vertical and horizontal; the first building on the same Neoplatonic founding fathers of Late Antiquity, the second through direct Byzantine linkages. In fact, fifteenth-century Byzantine scholars such as Manuel Crysoloras and the “new” Plato, Gemistos Pletho, had brought almost the entire Neoplatonic corpus to Italy.20 In Florence, using the words of the novelist E. M. Forster, Pletho “explained Plato with great success, discoursing for hours upon the Beautiful to men who were then filling the world with beauty.”21 Also in Florence, it was Marsilio Ficino who managed to translate much of the Neoplatonic corpus, including the works of Plato, Plotinus and Hermes Trismegistus. Now, comparing the dissemination of Neoplatonism in the East and the West, we can observe a major divergence that happened during the twelfth century when Latinate Europe turned away from, and Persianate Islam embraced Neoplatonism. Hence, although both experienced a long sixteenth-century Neoplatonic Renaissance, in the West this signified a clear break with the past, in the East it was rather the climax of an already existing development. Obviously, bringing the various western and eastern branches under one label suggests a great deal of commensurability. For the global historian keen to detect such commensurabilities, I would suggest that the notion of multiple Neoplatonisms may prove to be much more fruitful than that of multiple Modernities. Apart from the fact that Neoplatonism is obviously less teleological than Modernity, the main reason for this is that many philosophers in both the Latinate and the Persianate world themselves recognized Plato as their main starting point. In my view, this common Platonic background may help us to better grasp such apparently strange parallels as sixteenth-century millenarianism, which is in fact more of a late-Platonic phenomenon than an early-modern one.22 Indeed, if we accept that both the Latinate and the Persianate world were part of one Neoplatonic cosmopolis and that both experienced a revival of Neoplatonic ideas during the long sixteenth century, it becomes all the more urgent to (a) more specifically locate its main centres and (b) to investigate to what extent we are actually dealing with one grand philosophical legacy. In other words, what characterizes an idea or a practice to make it Neoplatonic? The two questions converge because each regional centre has produced its own brand of Neoplatonism. It thus makes sense to start thinking about this issue from a historical and historiographical point of view. How have contemporary actors themselves, and historians studying them afterwards, described or defined Neoplatonism?

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Although it would be worthwhile to highlight on each and every regional case, in this all too brief essay I will discuss more broadly primarily the unity and to a lesser extent the diversity of Neoplatonism by comparing some of its sixteenth-century manifestations at the two extremes of the Platonic cosmopolis: England under Elizabeth and the early Stuart kings James I and Charles I, and Mughal India under Akbar and Jahangir. Table 1: The English and Mughal rulers of the Platonic Cosmopolis Elizabeth I: 1558-1603

Akbar: 1556-1605

James I: 1603-1625

Jahangir: 1605-1627

Charles I: 1625-1649

Shah Jahan: 1627-1658

Since Neoplatonism was primarily a courtly phenomenon, we will not be dealing with the usual agent of globalization—cities and trade—but with a world connected by royal courts and their intellectual entanglements with a common Neoplatonic legacy. In the remainder of the essay, I will discuss the main commonalities of this Neoplatonic cosmopolis on the basis of the three so-called Platonic transcendentals: truth, beauty and justice, and will try to find more concrete manifestations of these values at the two farthest termini of the cosmopolis: England and India. But since all this has a deep past, I will start with a more general, fairly encyclopaedic description of Neoplatonism that goes back to the phenomenological, Neoplatonist beginnings in Late Antiquity.

Platonism as a Meta-Discourse For the present purpose, I take Neoplatonism as a broad meta-discourse that as a result of its elastic, layered hierarchical structure was able to absorb, appropriate and creatively harmonize the various other philosophical and religious traditions that it encountered. It is only in the West during and after our Neoplatonic Renaissance that we can witness an increasing tendency to revert to the original Platonic text. It was only much later and as a result of eighteenth-century German scholarship that a clear-cut distinction between Platonism and Neoplatonism became fashionable.23 This essay discusses Neoplatonism because the overwhelming majority of those who called themselves Platonists in the long sixteenth century were in fact what today we would call Neoplatonists.24 It is due to the systemic approach of these Neoplatonists that the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is able to identify Neoplatonism by four philosophical-cosmological features: idealism, monism, emanationism, and the human potential for divinization.25 In order

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to recognize Neoplatonism, not only as a philosophy but as a wider meta-discourse with a long history of its own, it will be good to bear these more general ramifications in mind before elaborating on the specific sixteenth-century manifestations of that discourse. Firstly, Neoplatonists assume that Intellect (nous, Mind or Mindful Consciousness) is in an important sense ontologically prior to the physical realm which is itself typically taken as being the ultimate reality. Neoplatonists agree with Plato (against Aristotle) that the objects of the Intellect (abstract concepts) are also ontologically prior. And so, Neoplatonism inevitably proved to be an idealist type of philosophy. Secondly, Neoplatonists assume that reality, in all its cognitive and physical manifestations, depends on the highest principle of conscience, which is unitary and singular. Neoplatonic philosophy is a strict form of principle-monism which strives to understand everything on the basis of a single cause that adherents consider divine, and indiscriminately refer to as “the First”, “the One”, or “the Good”. From this follows the third Neoplatonist assumption, emanationism: that the universe was created in a great chain of being; that reality emanates from “the First” in coherent stages, in such a way that one stage functions as the creative principle for the next; and that every activity in the world is in some sense double because it possesses both an inner and an outer aspect. Neoplatonists insist that there is nothing at the lower ontological levels within the chains of causality that is not somehow prefigured at the corresponding higher levels. In general, no property emerges unless it is already, in some way, preformed and pre-existent in its cause. This thinking in terms of top-down emanation—often compared to light radiating out from the sun—creates various levels of being. Hence, the derivative outer activity of the first principle, Intellect, becomes a second “hypostasis”. In turn, the inner active life of the Intellect produces further outer effect, the Soul (psychê). In the same way—whether or not with the help of a Demiurge or a divine craftsman—the Soul facilitates the manifestation of form in matter. Further distinctions are drawn between the hypostases in order to articulate the transitions from one level of Being to another. As a result, every aspect of the natural world, even the meanest piece of inorganic and apparently useless matter, has an eternal and divine moment. From this, it follows that human existence is a striking representation of the cosmos as a whole, a microcosm in which all levels of being are combined into one organic individual. This leads to the fourth—moral—Neoplatonic assumption, which is targeted at individual deification through a sincere and arduous effort to return to the One and forever abrogate any concerns for the body. During the long sixteenth century, these four defining characteristics were more or less retained. What is perhaps more important for the development of Platonism is to once again stress that all four features were immensely instrumental in facilitating the incorporation of various other philosophical and religious

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traditions. It is not so much the specific outcome but the process of assimilation itself that most strikes me as thoroughly Neoplatonic. And although Neoplatonism was certainly not the only intellectual tradition at the sixteenth-century Latinate and Persianate courts, its highly flexible and all-encompassing metaphysics made it into such a very powerful assimilative force that absorbed many of these other traditions. How convenient for rulers living in an age of political expansion, increasing confessional conflict and increasing globalization! Not surprisingly, the result often looks eclectic and too often scholars have wasted too much time in precisely dissecting the various intellectual origins of Neoplatonism, without realizing that (a) Neoplatonism itself is an eclectic bunch of different ideas, and (b) Neoplatonism has been crucial in bringing all these elements together. In the words of the Belgian historian Peter van Nuffelen, “Neoplatonism presents itself as a religion transcending all religions.”26 This argument links up rather well with that of the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann about cosmotheism. Indeed, during the Neoplatonic Renaissance we find philosophers, scientists, artists and kings alike longing for a pristine, cosmotheistic past that was still unaffected by the Mosaic distinction which had brought forth the monotheistic counter-religions Christianity and Islam. Whereas counter-religions blocked intercultural translatability, cosmotheism rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible. In counter-religion, the other religion—take, for example, that of Egypt or India—is false; in cosmotheism, the other religion is encompassed within the whole, and may even become perceived as its origin.27 Keeping the extraordinary assimilative power of Neoplatonism in mind, what can be said more specifically about its sixteenth-century English and Mughal manifestations in the fields of the science, arts, and politics? Of course, the following is by no means intended as an exhaustive list but offers just a few examples to suggest the value of a scholarly exercise that obviously needs to be far more elaborate and detailed than what is offered here as just an appetizer.28 The Truth of the Philosopher-Scientist: Mathematization Truth in Neoplatonism is not about the sensory experience of the Material World but about the higher Forms that dwell in the Intellect. Although the Material World is just an image of the Intellect, the Forms have myriad hidden correspondences with material objects. These correspondences are mediated through an animate World Soul, which can be perceived by philosophers, scientists, artists and rulers alike, by conceiving images or ideas in their souls, possibly with the help of their memory. This enables them to link these images to their origin in the Intellect, and as such their souls may achieve a reunion with the higher Forms.

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The Neoplatonic ambition to detect hidden Intellectual unity in a Material World of increasing diversity is clearly apparent in the increasing fascination for the occult sciences at the Renaissance courts of Europe and in the eastern Islamic world. In Europe, it was in particular alchemy and astrology that became fashionable. Not all of this was necessarily Neoplatonic in nature but both contributed significantly to the Neoplatonic agenda of cosmic reunion. The alchemist, for example, was believed to possess the power to link earthly objects with their archetypal Forms. Indeed, alchemy was aimed to “restore the entire Natural World to its pristine state, when humanity and nature were still in perfect harmony.”29 In its unifying sense the same was true of astrology. The radiance of the sun, the stars and the planets was seen as an emanation flowing from the One into the Intellect, the World Soul, the Material World and the individual soul. For Neoplatonists, the celestial world of planets and stars was part of an animated cosmos that can be known because the individual soul is drawn by means of a spiritual desire for reunion with the World Soul. With the help of talismans, this may even lead to the acquisition of magical power. Ficino himself formulated it as follows: By the application of our spirit to the spirit of the cosmos, achieved by physical science and our affect, celestial goods pass to our soul and body. This happens down here through our spirit within us which is a mediator, strengthened then by spirit of the cosmos, and from above by way of the rays of the stars acting favourably on our spirit, which not only is similar to the rays by nature but also then makes itself more like celestial things.30

The very same Neoplatonic agenda of cosmic reunion drove the occult sciences at the Islamic courts under the patronage of Turco-Mongolian Persianate rulers, even giving rise to a kind of supernatural arms race. Apart from astrology and, to a lesser extent, alchemy, the most popular sciences were lettrism and geomancy.31 Both in the Latinate and Persianate courts there was an increasing fascination with Pythagoras and, with this, a longing to understand the cosmos through the figures and basic geometric forms that united manifest Nature with occult Forms. All this fitted the Neoplatonic quest to mathematize the universe. Whether at the fifteenth-century courts of the De’ Medici in Florence or the Timurids in Samarkand, or at the sixteenth-century courts of the Stuarts in London or the Mughals in Agra, all grasped the epistemological, magical force of Platonic-Pythagorean mathematics which not only impacted science but also deeply affected the arts and the politics at these courts.32

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The Beauty of the Philosopher-Artist: Platonic Love So, it was not just Neoplatonic scientists, but also Neoplatonic artists who longed for cosmic reunion. For them, it was beauty as divine love that could make this happen.33 On the basis of Plato’s Symposium, Ficino had defined love as the desire for beauty: As a ray which emanated from God and progressively penetrated the created world, moving downwards from the angelic mind to the material substance of bodies. All beauty in the universe was therefore the radiance of the divine countenance.34

From the bottom up, thanks to the divine furor of the artist, love ascended the ladder, from the beauty of the body to that of the soul, from the soul’s beauty to the Intellect, and from there finally to God. This was the famous Platonic love so poetically expressed in Giralomo Benivieni’s Canzone Amor della cui but given its widest circulation through the rhetoric of Pietro Bembo in Castiglioni’s seminal Il libro del cortegiano. After the latter appeared in an English translation in 1561, it had a pervasive impact on the imagination of courtiers in Elizabethan England. More than anything else, the Neoplatonist artist emphasized the imagination and believed in a world of higher realities, beyond the fallible realm of sense perception. His soul belonged to a higher world and could actually find its way back there. It was an inspired, inner imagination that assisted the soul in its return to its true home.35 With this goal in mind, the artist often imagined the soul as a clean mirror: receptive, willing and ready to respond to divine radiation. It requires contemplation and training oriented towards the highest level, in which the artist becomes progressively more attuned to and even participates in the divine.36 Perceiving this radiated beauty enables philosopher-artists, like philosopher-scientists through mathematization, to perceive the hidden meanings and correspondences beyond the visible. Indeed, by using abstracted images such as allegories, emblems, signs or hieroglyphs, artists can attempt to comprehend as many of these as possible. What is more, the artist’s creation of painting, poetry and music represents his attempt to transform the lower, Material World into the higher world of the Intellect. Using the words of Ann Sheppard, Neoplatonic artists were not admired for “any ability to create new worlds but rather for an inspired capacity to reveal what is always there for those whose souls can rise to apprehend it.”37 Or as John Hendrix has it: “beauty is always in the eyes of the beholder: the beauty of the perceived object is a shadow of the beauty in the soul of the artist.”38 To continue with Sheppard, the Neoplatonic artist, unlike the scientist, does not report metaphysical truth directly but he has a habit of concealing the truth behind a veil of allegory. In fact, the veil becomes an instrument to achieve knowledge of

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the Forms, the latter shining through the veil. Hence, we need to see through the veil and let ourselves be directed by the veil’s beauty to ascend to the Intellect to ultimately find assimilation and identification with the One.39 It is exactly this distinction between the seen and unseen, that visible things have not only a visible form but also an invisible higher one, that makes for an interesting parallel between the predominant Mannerist painting at the European courts and Mughal miniature painting.40 According to Akbar, the best painting was the one that showed the hidden meaning behind the visible. The latter was often called ṣūra in Arabic, which means “picture” or “image”. Interestingly, early Islamic Neoplatonists had used the same word to refer to Neoplatonic Form, which implies that objects were depicted in an abstracted, essentialized form.41 Later, apparently in contrast to this earlier practice, the Mughals used the term ṣūrat in Persian to refer to the visible images of the material word against maʿ nī which instead referred to the higher, invisible, essential meaning of things.42 For the art historian David Roxburgh, the use of the ubiquitous veiling image in Persian painting also invokes the mystical concept of the interior (bāṭin) and exterior (ẓāhir) of esoteric and exoteric knowledge. The idea of transforming the seen into its abstracted absolute, and so to make it point back towards some hidden essential reality, permeates the Persianate arts as a whole and once again suggests the importance of the Neoplatonic imagination for the Islamic world.43 Likewise, for the Mannerist painters of the European Renaissance the highest form of painting was not about the perception of real life, but about innate, spiritual imagination. Or, to the use the words of the Dutch Mannerist thinker Karel van Mander, the highest form of painting was not painting naer het leven (from life) but uyt den geest (from the mind or spirit).44 For Neoplatonists in East and West, the best artists were inspired artists who were capable of sensing beauty and translating it into a symbolic and allegorical manifestation of the cosmos. The symbol and allegories that they produced indicated truth, not through resemblance but through direct ontological connection.45 Hence, their mimesis of the perceived natural world was a direct reflection of higher realities which directed viewers and readers towards the ultimate Beauty-cum-Truth.46 For the Neoplatonist, there is no distinction between epistemology and aesthetics: what can be achieved by mathematics for the first, was allegory for the latter. When considering the various muses, it was not only painting or poetry, but also music that appealed to the Neoplatonic courts in both England and Mughal India. Neoplatonic musicians at both courts were very much aware of the phenomenon that music could guide the soul to a reunion with the divine. They also knew very well that harmony was related to the medical equipoise of the body as well as to the inaudible harmony of the seven celestial bodies moving through the twelve houses of the Zodiac.47

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Interestingly, it is only at the English court that we find drama plays a similar role, while it plays no role whatsoever at the Mughal court. At the Stuart court, the Neoplatonic fascination for concealment shows most dramatically in the so-called court masque where courtiers, as “embodied hieroglyphs”, actuate the play’s emblematic imagery and become refined versions of themselves.48 One may even speculate that the grace and efficacy of the unseen is also conveyed in the well-known courtly phenomenon of sprezzatura in which the courtier fashioned himself in what can be interpreted as an emblematic persona. According to the English art historian Roy Strong, the highly prominent court masque was the ideal vehicle for the early Stuart kings to exhibit their divinity to their court in a series of emblematic tableaux, in which the masquers as various personifications of Neoplatonic ideas vanquished all opposition to the crown and its policies.49 For example, in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1604) we find James symbolized by the sun casting a “sciential light” of knowledge over his empire. In another piece Hymenaei (1605) the sun’s burning rays symbolised James’ wisdom, which in turn was expressed through an alchemical union of the elements.50 Living slightly earlier than James, we know that Akbar also was an avid sun worshipper. In this he followed Suhrawardi’s idea that the sun was not God but merely His image, His light. Hence the worship of the sun was actually the worship of God’s light which would facilitate the ascent of the soul to the celestial realm. Interestingly, Akbar’s sun worship was not conveyed in a court masque but in court, which bring us to the political manifestation of Neoplatonism at the two courts.

The Justice of the Philosopher-King: Wisdom As much as the idioms of Neoplatonic science and arts are related to each other, both are related to the idiom of Neoplatonic politics. As far as science is concerned, it is most conspicuous in the importance kings attached to horoscopes; as far as the arts are concerned, it shows in the way mutual love dominates the rhetoric of the king’s relationship with his followers. In all the three fields, it is the soul that can move between the spheres to achieve the highest Good, which can even encompass God. To achieve this, the soul requires, first of all, self-awareness. Only the soul’s self-awareness will lead to responsible, correct action to make the soul participate in the World Soul. For Plotinus, it is contemplation that exhorts us to become “a soul of the All”, to shake off our material attachments, and, in various stages of ascent, to return to and find union with the ultimate cause, the One. Hence, Plotinus asks us to lead a contemplative life: “let not merely the enveloping body be at peace, body’s turmoil stilled, but all that lies around, earth at peace, and sea at peace, and air and the

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very heavens.”51 However, Plotinus (Enneads VI, 8) is not only concerned with the metaphysical side of such contemplation but also points out that contemplation is a source of action and actually entails a civic form of engagement.52 For the Anglo-Welsh Neoplatonist Edward Herbert (1583-1648), readiness to know oneself would make religious peace and confessional unity attainable.53 This is also echoed by the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), who posits that human responsibility is grounded in the capacity for self-awareness.54 It is this idea of personal self-improvement that made Neoplatonists, from the sixth-century Simplicius to the seventeenth-century Henry More, so keen to embrace Stoicism. Through Lipsius, the latter became the dominant moral basis for politicians in much of seventeenth-century Europe, although far less so in Stuart England.55 It is up to inspired philosopher-kings, as perfect human beings, to understand the cosmos in all its complicated correspondences, to bring human morality in tune with them, and lead humanity to the ultimate Good. But even a philosopher-king must be keen to know himself in order to achieve, firstly, divination and, secondly, peace and justice for his realm. In the words of Ficino, summarizing Plato, he must be ready “to know the divine and govern the human.”56 In the first systematic study of Neoplatonic political philosophy, Dominic O’Meara argues against the still conventional idea that Neoplatonism failed to find a valid relation between its metaphysical and its practical philosophy. For O’Meara, the first step on the king’s path to divinization involves the cultivation of the political virtues described by Plato in his Republic: wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. These political virtues, although not godlike, mirror the divine. All this is mediated by the enlightened philosopher-king whose soul has been emancipated from preoccupation with the body to bring him nearer to the perfection of divine life.57 In more prosaic terms, for Neoplatonists, following Plato, power was justified when combined with reason or wisdom. In addition, for Neoplatonists, rule by a good man is preferable to rigid law codes or entrenched customs. Justice derives from the philosopher-king who, through divinization, becomes the lex animata, the living law, thereby overruling the authority of a hierocracy consisting of prophets, jurists and theologians. Thus, personal devotion to and love for the philosopher-king was more important than correctly adhering to any transcendent or scriptural law. The Neoplatonist kings— not forgetting queen Elizabeth—equipped themselves with the ancient, universal wisdom of a philosophia perennis to counter the doctrinal criticism of jurists and other keepers of a sacred law that derived from just one monotheist truth. To counter their wisdom, Neoplatonist kings often liked to challenge them in staged religious debates. In both East and West, Neoplatonic kings embraced models that stood above confessional denomination: heroes like Alexander or Solomon, or saintly sages like Orpheus, Hermes or Dionysius. In such situations, kings became

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indistinguishable from thaumaturges, saints and messiahs. At the same time, the Neoplatonist sense of divine truth, provisionally veiled, with revelation imminent, appealed to apocalyptic and millenarian tempers, highly relevant at the turn of the century, and even of the millennium in the case of Islam. The authority of these millennial sovereigns was not determined by truth or dogma but by divine grace, often symbolized by light and demonstrated by heroic deeds.58 The best result was not a separation of worldly and priestly realms but the Hobbesian ideal of placing the latter below the first. As we can witness in the case of Elizabeth, the early Stuarts and the early Mughals, the adaptable, all-encompassing, characteristic of Neoplatonism suited kings who were in need of a universal ideology that could overcome cultural diversity and confessional conflict in both England and India. Both the English and Mughal rulers fit the picture extraordinarily well. They all envisioned themselves as philosopher-kings in the Platonic tradition, appealing to higher wisdom to counter the criticism of the religious establishment. Interestingly, both James and Jahangir embraced the figure of King Solomon as a universal model of wisdom and justice.59 Within their own tradition, the early Stuarts referred to Henry VIII, the early Mughals to Chinggis Khan and Timur for providing the right examples of how to rein in their respective religious establishments.60 To the frustration of orthodox clerics, both the English and the Mughal kings exploited eschatological expectations and presented themselves as millennial saviours, the latter more openly so than the first. Indeed, it seems that in general the Neoplatonic ideals of political rule became more fully implemented in the Mughal Empire.61 The Mughals built their imperial administration on the Hellenic but strongly Persianized principles of good rule called akhlāq. Akhlāq started from the idea of the tripartite division of the soul, and envisioned that the soul should free itself from the influence of the body, and, as such, it is “reason” or “intellect” that should dominate the lower regions of the soul. It also carried over the Galenic medical analogy from ethics to politics, in which the ideal ruler was compared to a doctor who looks after the souls of his people. Hence, the state itself becomes compared to a body, with the ruler analogous to the heart.62 As in Neoplatonism in general, psychology (i.e. the science of the soul) and politics (i.e. the science of the body politic) become deeply entangled. In other words, Neoplatonist thought can teach one to become a ruler of both the self and the state.63 The Neoplatonic prescription of personal self-improvement comes very close to the way the Neoplatonist ideologues of Mughal rule perceived ṣulḥ-i kull or “peace for all”, a principle which in due course would become the central ethos of the Mughal administration; i.e. an Indian Neoplatonic counterpart of the Neostoic ethos that pervaded the administrations of so many European states at that time. At the early stages of its existence, Neoplatonists stressed how self-discipline and the

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equipoise of the individual soul was linked to that of the state. Following Muzaffar Alam, justice in the ideal state is defined as social harmony and the coordination and balance of the conflicting claims of diverse interest groups that may comprise people of various religions. The ruler, like the good physician, must know the diseases that afflict society, their symptoms and the correct treatment. Since society is composed of groups of diverse interests and individuals of conflicting dispositions, the king must take all possible care to ensure that wisdom works smoothly, to maintain the health of society and the equipoise within it.64 What is crucial in akhlāq is this linkage between micro- and macrocosms, also expressed in the idea of siyāsat or politics, denoting discipline, control and management in which the king is advised to discipline his own self first, thereby acquiring the moral authority to control and discipline others.65 The story of Elizabeth and the Stuarts is similar and different. More than the early Mughals, they had to deal with hardening confessional frontlines as a result of the Reformation. Also, much more so than the Mughals, they were embroiled in a conflict between episcopal and royal claims to divine rule. Protestant rulers especially required a politico-religious ideology that could bolster their position at the top of the Church. The Stuarts came under repeated pressure to demonstrate their religious orthodoxy and saw themselves besieged by religious fanatics. At the same time, there was the ongoing threat of resurgent papal authority. James, in particular, invested enormous efforts in an intellectual contest with the papacy over who was supreme in the sacerdotium. In these circumstances, Neoplatonist supporters of the crown like John Dee, Edmund Spenser, Inigo Jones and many others provided the means in courtly ceremony, architecture and liturgical worship to re-enchant royal authority.66 All this was to stress the position of the sovereign as supreme priest-king—James, like Akbar, preferring the word; Charles, like Jahangir, preferred the image to propagate the message.67 As indicated already by the sheer quantity of courtly masques, the early Stuarts may be seen as ruling over an almost Geertzian theatre state where it was not drama that legitimized power, but power that served drama. It was not without reason that contemporaries compared the court to a stage. Both James and Akbar had similar dreams of millennial rule but James’s ideal was only realized in poetic and dramatic fiction, whereas Akbar’s was realized in real life.68 The same goes for their common identification with the sun, both Neoplatonically conceiving their rule as a vision of light, but whereas for James it was mere play, it was Akbar who dared to publicly support sun worship. As Neoplatonic kings, both James and Akbar aimed to marry the lower to the upper world and tried to impose a mathematical design of cosmic proportions on their capitals, this to prefigure a new age and the coming of the messiah. Whereas Akbar simply built his own harmonious Platonopolis from scratch in Fatehpur Sikri, James’ New Jerusalem remained unrealized as he was

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unable to dispose of the old capital city of London. It was the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) which dealt the final blow to the Neoplatonic dream of the early Stuarts. The only way the English managed to keep at least part of the dream alive was to separate the person and office of the king. In this way, the fall of the first would not affect the sanctity of the latter. It was no longer the king, but kingship and the abstracted, mystified state, which attracted devotion, ultimately not deriving top down from the One, but legitimized from the bottom up by the people.69

Conclusion In this essay I have tried to unveil an ancient Neoplatonic cord that connected the long sixteenth-century Latinate and Persianate courts. Due to academic specialization and a teleological preoccupation with Modernity, it has for too long been hidden in silence. Obviously, the present exercise is just one of speculative intuition but it is my contention that by using a Neoplatonic perception of things, at least some apparently strange parallels in global history suddenly become pretty obvious. Not that all this is new. One of Plato’s late disciples, Ralph Waldo Emerson—very much a Neoplatonist soul—had this to say about the old master: No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men—Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts.70

With the Elizabethans and Akhlaq, we have already revisited two items on Emerson’s longlist. There is much, if not almost everything, that still needs to be explored, if only for the long sixteenth century, if only for that Neoplatonic Cosmopolis that stretched from the Thames to the Ganges. What should we make of the many other knots in the cord, with almost every European and Islamic region having a Neoplatonic moment of its own? Why a Neoplatonic Renaissance at this moment of time? Was it the result of a global information explosion that accompanied European exploration? Did Neoplatonism provide a convenient, all-encompassing system to order an ever-expanding universe? Was it the result of a new age of empire since empires are in particular need of overarching ideologies, especially at a time of hardening religious boundaries, following the Reformation and resurgent orthodoxies?

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Illustration 2: Bichitr, “Jahangir enthroned on an hourglass,” ca. 1618. From the St. Petersburg Album, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

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Apart from the many Neoplatonic commonalities between the English and Mughal courts, there are many differences, also within the Neoplatonic mould. The one difference that really stands out is the divergence of the political pathways: English kings realizing their Neoplatonic dreams in fiction, Mughal kings living these same dreams in real life; for the first it was all mere metaphor, for the latter it was at least meaningful metaphor if not more than that.71 Hence, we arrive at a somewhat surprising image of early modern England as a failed state, certainly compared to the colossal wealth and power of the Mughal Empire, as was confirmed so often by the many English visitors to the Mughal court. The distinction between the two courts is also shown in the only painting that features both a Mughal and a Stuart king. This is the well-known miniature by Bichitr where we find Jahangir as the King of the Age enthroned on an hourglass. The text in the cartouches that accompany the allegory elaborate on the distinction between ṣūrat and maʿ nī. As mentioned already, the dichotomy corresponds with the Neoplatonic distinction between the visible, material world and the invisible, spiritual world of deeper meaning. If we read the message written on the cartouches, it says (bottom right) that, although in the sphere of the ṣūrat kings stand before him, in the sphere of maʿ nī he looks at the dervishes (bottom left). So, next to the stereotypical persona of the Ottoman sultan, we find James, both kings ruling over the Material World. Jahangir himself, though, portrays himself as someone who rules over ṣūrat and maʿ nī (top right).72 Indeed, very much like his father Akbar, he was the perfect man, the soul of the world, whose eyes and heart were with the origin of emanation, who made unity and multiplicity playmates: in other words, a true Neoplatonic philosopher-king.73

Notes 1

Cited in È. Feuillebois-Pierunek, “Jāmī’s Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt dar vaḥdat-i vujūd: Merging Akbarian Doctrine, Naqshbandī Practice, and Persian Mystical Quatrain,” in T. d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, eds., Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd Al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 355.

2

And perhaps even beyond to include those few royal courts of the New World and those of Southeast Asia. One could think, for example, of the “German” court of Johan Maurits of Nassau in Brazil. Although the Deccan sultanates are definitively part of the continuum, it remains to be seen whether, and to what extent, this is also true—perhaps without Plato—for the Malay courts of e.g. Aceh or Banten.

3

Here I follow Shahab Ahmad’s approach to Islam: S. Ahmad, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

4

This ambition is taken from various contributions in The Cambridge History of World Literature, in particular from Debjani Ganguly’s insightful introduction (D. Ganguly, The Cambridge History of World Literature, Volume 1, ed. Debjani Ganguly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021),

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1–46). Nonetheless, the comparative chapter by Ayesha Ramachandran on “Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia” (109–131) would have been even stronger if it had been more aware of the Graeco-Hellenic tradition that connected the two regions as exemplified in the chapter by Ahmed H. al-Rahim (“Arabic Literary Prose, Adab Literature, and the Formation of Islamicate Imperial Culture,” 80–108). 5

S. F. Ng, Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3. It should be noted though that Ng does not mention Neoplatonism and reserves a more prominent role for the Ottomans as connecting the English and Malay literary worlds.

6

Cf. L. P. Gerson, “What is Platonism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43, 3 (2005): 253–76.

7

See also P. Burke, L. Clossey and F. Fernández-Armesto, “The Global Renaissance,” Journal of World History 28, 1 (2017): 1–30, which, contrary to what the title suggests, offers a global view of the European Renaissance.

8

Although this analysis is entirely my own, for the general academic tendency to deprive the Islamic world of its occult elements, partly due to Orientalism, I also rely on the work of Matthew MelvinKouchki. See in particular M. Melvin-Kouchki, “Introduction: De-orienting the Study of Islamic Occultism,” Arabica 64 (2017): 287–95.

9

W. J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 325.

10

Hanegraaf, Esotericism and the Academy, 257–368; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Globalization of Esotericism,” Correspondences 3 (2015): 1–37. For an extremely critical review of what is often seen as a Neoplatonic craze of the Warburg school, see H. Bredekamp, “Götterdämmerung des Neuplatonismus,” Kritische Berichte 14, 4 (1986): 39–48. For a more balanced review, see C. Ginzburg, “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method,” in C. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 17–60; C. Landauer, “Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 47, 2 (1994): 255–81. Most recently: E. J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School (Chicago, MI: Chicago University Press, 2013).

11

The two most influential works: F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) and its companion F. A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)

12

See J. Gommans, The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550 (Amsterdam and Nijmegen: Rijksmuseum and Vantilt, 2018).

13

Despite the success of M. Bernal’s Black Athena, The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991) and a few follow-ups, Antiquity’s Mediterranean is still seen too much as a closed Graeco-Roman world.

14

W. B. Ashworth Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic Worldview,” in R. S. Westman and D. C. Lindberg, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 303–32. Cf. Michel Foucault’s Renaissance episteme based on resemblance and similitude, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974).

15

Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 53. For Walbridge, see his The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001). Interestingly, it was another scholar working on Islamic Neoplatonism, Henry Corbin, who had been the silent force behind the birth of Western Esotericism as an academic field (Hanegraaff, Esotericism, 277–310; 340–50).

16

W. Junker, “Plato and Platonism,” in Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. A. Escobedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 274. For another enlightening piece from the Spenser context,

192 jos gommans

see K. Borris, Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For a recent survey of the developments of Platonism in the European Middle Ages, see W. Otten, “Christianity’s Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, its Theoretical and Theological Appeal,” Numen 63 (2016): 245–70. 17

Plato’s work was also available in Arabic, most importantly his Timaeus and Laws.

18

M. Melvin-Koushki, “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy,” in A. Salvatore and R. Tottoli, eds., The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam (Chichester: Wiley, 2018) 353–375; S. Kamola, Making Mongol History: Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

19

A. Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

20

For suggesting a possible direct link between the Latinate and Persianate Renaissance through Pletho, see M. Mavroudi, “Pletho as Subversive and his Reception in the Islamic World,” in D. Angelov and M. Saxby, eds., Power and Subversion in Byzantium (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 177–203.

21

E. M. Forster, “Gemistus Pletho,” in E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), 183.

22

My own thinking about this started with a conversation with Sanjay Subrahmanyam in the mid1990s. See S. Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1997): 735–62, who also refers to Lieberman’s notion of strange parallels (V. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)), but taking a different, cultural take on it.

23

E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato: An Outline and Some Observations (Helsinki/Helsingfors: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1974). In the search for further authenticity, some have even questioned whether Plato truly was a Platonist (L. P. Gerson, “Plotinus and Platonism,” in H. Tarrant, et al., eds., Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 317. Interestingly, although the Neoplatonist were aware of an ongoing tradition, at least Proclos seems to have been aware of some break as he referred to “all newer Platonists since Plotinus” (T. Lankila, “The Byzantine Reception of Neoplatonism,” in A. Kaldellis and N. Siniossoglou, eds., The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 316); interestingly, the same author points out that 58 % of the nearly 11 million words of extant Greek philosophical texts were written by Neoplatonists, 318)

24 25

Gerson, “What is Platonism,” 254. C. Wildberg, “Neoplatonism,” in E. N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/neoplatonism/.

26

P. van Nuffelen, Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religions in the Post-Hellenistic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 240.

27

J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 3, 55. In a refreshingly bold stroke, Alan Strathern associates this tendency of encompassing subordination with Buddhism and contrasts it with monotheism (A. Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 135).

28

For a very different, book-length attempt to compare the Mughal court with a Renaissance court in Europe, see K. Rzehak, Macht und Literatur bei Timuriden und Habsburgern: Politische Übergang und kulturelle Blüte in den Selbstzeugnissen Baburs und Maximilians I. (Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 2019).

29

B. Janacek, Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 3; V. Hart, Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts

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(London and New York, 1994), 12. As for the other occult sciences, the literature on alchemy is vast, but for a recent survey see K. Hunger Parshall, M. T. Walton and B. T. Moran, eds., Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era, (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2015). 30

L. Saif, The Arabic Influence on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (London: Pallgrave, 2015), 40, 113.

31

M. Melvin-Koushki, “Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy: The Occult-Scientific Methods of Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism,” The Medieval History Journal 19, 1 (2016): 142–50.

32

See e.g. F. Carter, “Number Symbolism and Renaissance Chroreography,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10, 1 (1992): 21–39. The classic formulation is from Wittkower far back in 1949. See the first chapter in R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: St. Martin’s Press: 1988); M. Melvin-Koushki, “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition,” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017): 127–99. Many more examples in J. Hendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies & the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

33

For a fascinating homoerotic interpretation of courtly love poetry during the Ottoman Renaissance, including a plea for globalizing the Renaissance on the basis of some insightful comparisons with Europe, see W. G. Andrews and M. Kalpakli, The Age of the Beloveds.: Love and the Beloved in EarlyModern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Although not mentioned in this essay, the homoerotic aspects of Neoplatonism are relevant, also for the Mughal case, and are definitively in need of more exploration.

34

J. Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” in C. Schmitt, ed., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 354.

35

A. Sheppard, “Plato and the Neoplatonists,” in A. Baldwin and S. Hutton, eds., Platonism and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 18.

36

V. Olejniczak Lobsien, Transparancy and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early English Literature (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 13. For the mirror as a Neoplatonic symbol, see H. A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

37

Sheppard, “Plato and the Neoplatonists,” 17.

38

J. S. Hendrix, “Plotinus and the Artistic Imagination,” School of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications, Paper 31 (2015), 2, http://docs.rwu.edu/saahp_fp/31.

39

Sheppard, “Plato and the Neoplatonists,” 17. See also Lobsien, Transparancy and Dissimulation, 1–29.

40

For one of the few comparative studies on the visual arts between Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Middle East, see H. Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2011). For a critical review, see G. Necipoğlu “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight, and Desire,” Muqarnas 32, 1 (2015): 23–61. Here I agree with Necipoğlu. It is my contention that a more fitting comparison during the Renaissance period would, indeed, involve Florence but not Baghdad, neither Istanbul, nor Delhi, but Samarqand or perhaps Herat.

41

P. Berlekamp, Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 42–43. For the Neoplatonic inspiration of Islamic visual arts, see also the important work of G. Necipoğlu, The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of the Art and Humanities, 1996) as well as P. Soucek, “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 87–108 and Y. Porter, “From the ‘Theory of the Two Qalams’ to the ‘Seven Principles of Painting’: Theory, Terminology, and Practice in Persian Classical Painting,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 109–18. For exploring

194 jos gommans

some interesting Indic parallels, a good start would be P. Granoff, “Portraits, Likeness and Looking Glasses: Some Literary and Philosophical Reflections on Representation and Art in Medieval India,” in J. Assmann and A. I. Baumgarten, eds., Representation in Religion: Studies in Honor of Moshe Barasch (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 63–105. 42

H. Franke, “Emperors of Ṣūrat and Maʿnī: Jahangir and Shah Jahan as Temporal and Spiritual Rulers,” Muqarnas 31 (2014): 123–149. This apparent change of meaning of ṣūrat requires further investigation. It is possible that even depicting an object in the material world required essentializing that object (ṣūrat) in order to direct viewers to its essential reality (maʿnī).

43

D. J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 193. See also the important works of Johann Christoph Bürgel: The Feather of Simurgh: The “Licit Magic” of the Arts in Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1988) and Allmacht und Mächtigkeit: Religion und Welt in Islam (München: Beck, 1991).

44

See the works of Hessel Miedema: “Karel van Mander’s Grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst,” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 653–68; “Over het realisme in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw naar aanleiding van een tekening van Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1632),” Oud Holland 89 (1975): 2–16 and “On Mannerism and Maniera,” Simiolus 10 (1978-1979): 19–45.

45

P. T. Struck, “Allegory and Ascent in Neoplatonism,” in R. Copeland and P. T. Struck, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 69.

46

T. Rockmore, Art and Truth after Plato (Chicago, MI: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).

47

P. Gouk, “The Role of Harmonic in the Scientific Revolution,” in T. Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 223–45; K. Butler Schofield, “Musical Culture under Mughal Patronage: The Place of Pleasure,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Mughal World (forthcoming). For an interesting French example, see J. Brooks, “Music as Erotic Magic in a Renaissance Romance,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1207–56. It would be fascinating to explore the interaction between these Neoplatonic ideas at the Mughal court with the efflorescence of Indic rāgamālā genre, i.e. illustrative paintings of musical modes or rāgas, around 1600, see M. E. Aitken, “The Laud Rāgamālā Album, Bikaner, and the Sociability of Subimperial Painting,” Archives of Asian Art 63, no. 1 (2013): 27–58.

48

See also J. Limon, “The Masque of Stuart Culture,” in L. L. Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 209–30, and K. Shrieves, “Spiritual Alchemy through Embodied Hieroglyphs in Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, 3 (2014): 55–82.

49

R. Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 59.

50

Hart, Art and Magic, 156.

51

Taken from the extremely elucidating Philosophy in Late Antiquity by Andrew Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

52

R. J. Oosterhoff, “Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Charles de Bovelles on Platonism: Theurgy, and Intellectual Difficulty,” in S. Gersh, ed., Plotinus’ Legacy: The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 83.

53 54

Lobsien, Transparancy and Dissimulation, 19. D. Hedley, “Ralph Cudworth as Interpreter of Plotinus,” in S. Gersh, ed., Plotinus’ Legacy: The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 154.

55

J. H. M. Salmon, “Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” in L. L. Peck The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169–188; J. Sellars, “Henry More as Reader of Marcus Aurelius,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25, 5 (2017): 916–931; H.

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Baltussen, “Simplicius of Cilicia,” in L. P. Gerson, ed., The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 720. 56

V. Rees, “Ficino’s Advice to Princes,” in M. Allen and V. Rees, eds., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his

57

D. J. O’Meara, Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University

Philosophy, his Legacy, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 347. Press, 2003). See also A. Brown, “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought,” The Journal of Modern History 58, 2 (1986): 383–414. 58

For the English side of this phenomenon, see, among others, D. Brooks-Davies, The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); for the Persianate side, see A. A. Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

59

Hart, Art and Magic, infra; E. Koch, “The Mughal Emperors as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a Think Tank for Allegory,” Muqarnas 27 (2010): 277–311.

60

The first is well known; for the latter, see J. Gommans and S. R. Huseini, “Neoplatonism and the Pax Mongolica in the Making of Ṣulḥ-i Kull: A View from Akbar’s Millennial History,” Modern Asian Studies 56, 3 (2022): 870-901.

61

J. Gommans and S. R. Huseini, “Neoplatonic Kingship in Islam: Akbar’s Millennial History, ” in A. A. Moin and A. Strathern, eds., Sacred Kingship in Global History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022) and Gommans and Huseini, “Neoplatonism and the Pax Mongolica”.

62

R. Walzer and H. A. R. Gibb. “Akhlāḳ,” Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs; F. Rahman, “Aklāq,” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/7, 719–723, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/aklaq-ethics-plural-form-of-koloq-inborn-char� acter-moral-character-moral-virtue.

63

The last phrase taken from B. Boulet, “Chapter 30: The Philosopher-King,” in M. Beck, ed., Companion to Plutarch (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 459.

64

M. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200-1800 (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 47 and 57–58.

65

Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, 69–72; R. Kinra, “Revisiting the History and Historiography of Mughal Pluralism,” ReOrient 5, 2 (2020): 137–82; Gommans and Huseini, “Neoplatonism and the Pax Mongolica.”

66

Strathern discussed the same process as a “mechanism of immanentization” (Strathern, Unearthly Powers, 212).

67

R. G. Asch, Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment: The French and English Monarchies 1587-1688 (New York: Berghahn, 2014); J. P. Sommerville, “James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory,” in L. L. Peck The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 55–71. See also Strong, Art and Power and D. Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaisscance, 1485-1649 (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997). For the best survey of Mughal ideology as expressed in art, see E. Koch, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

68

For a somewhat similar argument, see A. A. Moin, “Akbar’s ‘Jesus’ and Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine’: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness,” Fragments 3 (2013-2014): 1–21. As pointed out by Jesse Russell, these dreams are not even materialized in fiction (J. Russell, “Edmund Spenser’s Ancient Hope: The Rise and Fall of the Dream of the Golden Age in The Faerie Queene,” Exploration in Renaissance Culture 44 (2018): 73–103).

69

This very close to the main thesis of E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).

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70

R. W. Emerson, “Plato; or, the Philosopher,” in B. Atkinson, ed., The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emersond (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 421. It is fascinating to read the many sharp connective insights in Emerson’s essay, although the book is also full of Orientalist stereotypes.

71

For the interpretation of metaphors in this sense, see Strathern, Uneartly Powers, 161–64.

72

Franke, “Emperors of Ṣūrat and Maʿ nī,” 138–141. See also C. Hille, “Gems of Sacred Kingship: Faceting Anglo-Mughal Relations around 1600,” in C. Göttler and M. Mochizuki, eds., The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art (Leiden: Brill 2017), 291–318.

73

Just a selection of the many qualities attributed to Akbar in Abul Fazl, The History of Akbar, Vol.1, ed. and trans. W. M. Thackston, Murty Classical Library of India 2 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 13–27.

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Bredekamp, Horst. “Götterdämmerung des Neuplatonismus.” Kritische Berichte 14, 4 (1986): 39–48. Brooks, Jeanice. “Music as Erotic Magic in a Renaissance Romance.” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1207–1256. Brooks-Davies, Douglas. The Mercurian Monarch: Magical Politics from Spenser to Pope. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. Brown, Alison. “Platonism in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Its Contribution to Early Modern Political Thought.” The Journal of Modern History 58, 2 (1986): 383–414. Bürgel, Johann Christoph. The Feather of Simurgh: The “Licit Magic” of the Arts in Islam. New York: New York University Press, 1988. ———. Allmacht und Mächtigkeit: Religion und Welt in Islam. München: Beck, 1991. Burke, Peter, Luke Clossey, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Global Renaissance.” Journal of World History 28, 1 (2017): 1–30. Butler Schofield, Katherine. “Musical Culture under Mughal Patronage: The Place of Pleasure.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Mughal World (forthcoming). Carter, Françoise. “Number Symbolism and Renaissance Chroreography.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 10, 1 (1992): 21–39. Davidson, Herbert A. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Plato; or, the Philosopher.” In The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson, 421–449. New York, The Modern Library, 2000. Feuillebois-Pierunek, Ève. “Jāmī’s Sharḥ-i rubāʿiyyāt dar vaḥdat-i vujūd: Merging Akbarian Doctrine, Naqshbandī Practice, and Persian Mystical Quatrain.” In Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd Al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, edited byThibaut d’Hubert and Alexandre Papas, 343–366. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Forster, E. M. “Gemistus Pletho.” In E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest, 178–191. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications, 1974. Franke, Heike. “Emperors of Ṣūrat and Maʿ nī: Jahangir and Shah Jahan as Temporal and Spiritual Rulers.” Muqarnas 31 (2014): 123–49. Ganguly, Debjani. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge History of World Literature, Volume 1, edited by Debjani Ganguly, 1–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Gerson, Lloyd P. “What is Platonism.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43, 3 (2005): 253–76. ———. “Plotinus and Platonism.” In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity, edited by Harold Tarrant et al., 316–35. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Ginzburg, Carlo. “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method.” In Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 17–60. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Gommans, Jos. The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550. Amsterdam and Nijmegen: Rijksmuseum and Vantilt, 2018. ———, and Said Reza Huseini. “Neoplatonic Kingship in Islam: Akbar’s Millennial History.” In Sacred Kingship in Global History, edited by A. Azfar Moin and Alan Strathern, 192–222. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. ———, and Said Reza Huseini. “Neoplatonism and the Pax Mongolica in the Making of Ṣulḥ-i Kull: A View from Akbar’s Millennial History” Modern Asian Studies 56, 3 (2022). Gouk, Penelope. “The Role of Harmonic in the Scientific Revolution.” In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, 223–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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Granoff, Phyllis. “Portraits, Likeness and Looking Glasses: Some Literary and Philosophical Reflections on Representation and Art in Medieval India.” In Representation in Religion: Studies in Honor of Moshe Barasch, edited by Jan Assmann and Albert I. Baumgarten, 63–105. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ———. “The Globalization of Esotericism.” Correspondences 3 (2015): 1–37. Hart, Vaughan. Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts. London and New York, 1994. Hedley, Douglas. “Ralph Cudworth as Interpreter of Plotinus.” In Plotinus’ Legacy: The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era, edited by Stephen Gersh, 146–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Hendrix, John S. Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies & the Visual Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. ———. “Plotinus and the Artistic Imagination.” School of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications. Paper 31 (2015). http://docs.rwu.edu/saahp_fp/31. Accessed August 30, 2020. Hille, Christiane. “Gems of Sacred Kingship: Faceting Anglo-Mughal Relations around 1600.” In The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, edited by Christine Göttler and Mia Mochizuki, 291–318. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Howarth, David. Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaisscance, 1485-1649. Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1997. Hunger Parshall, Karen, and Michael T. Walton, and Bruce T. Moran, eds. Bridging Traditions: Alchemy, Chemistry, and Paracelsian Practices in the Early Modern Era. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2015. Janacek, Bruce. Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. Junker, William. “Chapter 29: Plato and Platonism.” In Edmund Spenser in Context, edited by Andrew Escobedo, 273–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Kamola, Stefan Kamola. Making Mongol History. Rashid al-Din and the Jamiʿ al-Tawarikh. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Kraye, Jill. “Moral Philosophy.” In The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles Schmitt, 303–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Kinra, Rajeev. “Revisiting the History and Historiography of Mughal Pluralism.” ReOrient 5, 2 (2020): 137–82. Koch, Ebba. Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “The Mughal Emperors as Solomon, Majnun, and Orpheus, or the Album as a Think Tank for Allegory.” Muqarnas 27 (2010): 277–311. Landauer, Carl. “Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 47, 2 (1994): 255–81. Lankila, Tuomo. “The Byzantine Reception of Neoplatonism.” In The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, edited by Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou, 314–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Levine, Emily J. Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Lieberman, Victor. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Limon, Jerzy. “The Masque of Stuart Culture.” In The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, edited by Linda Levy Peck, 209–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Mavroudi, Maria. “Pletho as Subversive and his Reception in the Islamic World.” In Power and Subversion in Byzantium, edited by Dimeter Angelov and Michael Saxby, 177–203. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. “Astrology, Lettrism, Geomancy: The Occult-Scientific Methods of Post-Mongol Islamicate Imperialism.” The Medieval History Journal 19, 1 (2016): 142–150. ———. “Introduction: De-orienting the Study of Islamic Occultism.” Arabica 64 (2017): 287–295. ———. “Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition.” Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5 (2017): 127–99. ———. “Early Modern Islamicate Empire: New Forms of Religiopolitical Legitimacy.” In The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, edited by Armando Salvatore and Roberto Tottoli, 353–75. Chichester: Wiley, 2018. Miedema, Hessel. “Karel van Mander’s Grondt der Edel Vry Schilderconst.” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 653–668. ———. “Over het realisme in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de zeventiende eeuw naar aanleiding van een tekening van Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1632).” Oud Holland 89 (1975): 2–16 ———. “On Mannerism and Maniera.” Simiolus 10 (1978-1979): 19–45. Moin, A. Azfar. The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. ———. “Akbar’s ‘Jesus’ and Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine’: Strange Parallels of Early Modern Sacredness.” Fragments, 3 (2013-2014): 1–21. Necipoğlu, Gülru. The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of the Art and Humanities, 1996. ———. “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight, and Desire.” Muqarnas 32, 1 (2015): 23–61. Ng, Su Fang. Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Nuffelen, Peter van. Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religions in the Post-Hellenistic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. O’Meara, Dominic J. Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Olejniczak Lobsien Verena. Transparancy and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early English Literature. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. Oosterhoff, Richard J. “Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Charles de Bovelles on Platonism: Theurgy, and Intellectual Difficulty.” In Plotinus’ Legacy: The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era, edited by Stephen Gersh, 73–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Otten, Willemien. “Christianity’s Content: (Neo)Platonism in the Middle Ages, its Theoretical and Theological Appeal.” Numen 63 (2016): 245–70. Porter, Yves. “From the ‘Theory of the Two Qalams’ to the ‘Seven Principles of Painting’: Theory, Terminology, and Practice in Persian Classical Painting.” Muqarnas, 17 (2000) 109–118. Rahman, F. “Aklāq.” Encyclopædia Iranica, I/7, 719–723. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/aklaqethics-plural-form-of-koloq-inborn-character-moral-character-moral-virtue. Accessed August 30, 2020. Ramachandran, Ayesha. “Worldmaking and Early Modernity: Cartographic Poesis in Europe and South Asia.” In The Cambridge History of World Literature, Volume 1, edited by Debjani Ganguly, 109–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

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Rees, Valery. “Ficino’s Advice to Princes.” In Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, edited by Michael Allen and Valery Rees, 339–57. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Rockmore, Tom. Art and Truth after Plato. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. Roxburgh, David J. Prefacing the Image: The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth-Century Iran. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Russell, Jesse. “Edmund Spenser’s Ancient Hope: The Rise and Fall of the Dream of the Golden Age in The Faerie Queene.” Exploration in Renaissance Culture 44 (2018): 73–103. Rzehak, Kristina. Macht und Literatur bei Timuriden und Habsburgern: Politische Übergang und kulturelle Blüte in den Selbstzeugnissen Baburs und Maximilians I. Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag, 2019. Saif, Liana. The Arabic Influence on Early Modern Occult Philosophy. London: Pallgrave, 2015. Salmon, J. H. M. “Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England.” In The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, edited by Linda Levy Peck, 169–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Sellars, John. “Henry More as Reader of Marcus Aurelius.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25, 5 (2017): 916–931. Sheppard, Anne. “Plato and the Neoplatonists.” In Platonism and the English Imagination, edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton, 3–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Shrieves, Katherine. “Spiritual Alchemy through Embodied Hieroglyphs in Jonson’s Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, 3 (2014): 55–82. Smith, Andrew. Philosophy in Late Antiquity. London: Routledge, 2004. Sommerville, J. P. “James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory.” In The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, edited by Linda Levy Peck, 55–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Soucek, Priscilla. “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition.” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 87–108. Strathern, Alan. Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Strong, Roy. Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Struck, Peter T. “Allegory and Ascent in Neoplatonism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. edited by Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck, 57–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia.” Modern Asian Studies 31, 3 (1997): 735–762. Tigerstedt, E. N. The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato: An Outline and Some Observations. Helsinki and Helsingfors: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1974. Truschke, Audrey. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Walbridge, John. The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardi and Platonic Orientalism. New York: State University of New York Press, 2001. Walzer, R. and H. A. R. Gibb. “Akhlāḳ,” Encyclopedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs. Leiden: Brill, 1954-2005. Wildberg, Christian. “Neoplatonism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/neoplatonism/. Wittkower, Rudolf. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. London: St. Martin’s Press: 1988. Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. ———. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.

CHAPTER 8

Radical Presentism J. Daniel Elam

Abstract This is an attempt to reflect on questions I buried in the footnotes of my monograph, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. This reflection took place over the course of a year following its publication, and in the context of finishing an anthology of political theory from the Global South in the twentieth century. This is an indulgent and scattered exercise, but I hope it also demonstrates an attempt to revisit (or foreground, or perhaps unearth) some persistent concerns that haunt the projects of writing world literature and world history. In this essay, I ask how scholars of world literature and world history offer accounts of thinkers and writers who envisioned or theorized world literature and world history in their own times. Additionally, what have been the uses of theorising world literature and world history, especially as political projects? Is it possible, in other words, to wrestle with the political implications of our scholarly endeavor (of writing world history or of analyzing and defining world literature) without identifying the political potency of these categories for other projects? What is the political value of claiming ‘world history’ for the project of anticolonial activism, or ‘world literature’ as a method of critique for anticolonial thought?

Keywords: Postcolonialism; Fanon; Ambedkar; Bhagavad Gita; Global Intellectual History

This chapter is an attempt to reflect on questions I buried in the footnotes of my monograph, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth. This reflection took place over the course of a year following its publication, and in the context of finishing an anthology of political theory from the Global South in the twentieth century. This is an indulgent and scattered exercise, but I hope it also demonstrates an attempt to revisit (or foreground, or perhaps unearth) some persistent concerns that haunt the projects of writing world literature and world history. First: how might scholars of world literature and world history offer accounts of thinkers and writers who envisioned or theorized world literature and world history in their own times? Second: what have been the uses of theorising world literature and world history, especially as political projects? Is it possible, in other words, to wrestle with the political implications of our scholarly endeavor (of writing world history or of analyzing/defining world literature) without identifying the political

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potency of these categories for other projects? What is the political value of claiming ‘world history’ for the project of anticolonial activism, or ‘world literature’ as a method of critique for anticolonial thought? The circuitous path of vignettes that follow offers one possible way of wrestling with these questions (though they remain unanswered despite being unearthed from the footnotes): a tentative recuperation of presentism as a mode of analysis and critique that commits to the present, rather than merely relying on its analytical rubrics. Anticolonial writers and thinkers were presentist world historians and world literary critics, and unapologetically so: the very “world” they sought to bring into existence had to be imagined in and for the present. This work was occasionally naïve, but it was always strategic. Thinkers were at pains to cull a world history or a world literature, from the rubble of the inherited world that was in the service of a new world. Picking through rubble is always necessarily strategic. The necessity of thinking world literature and world history together is that they revise each other in perpetuity, and in so doing, revise the world. Anticolonial thought, much like contemporaneous philological thought, understood the urgency of this task and the necessity of mobilizing all literature and all history for the task of transforming the present world. As modes of critique, these two bodies of thought offer us a vision for revolutionary methods in the service of a world we will not have lived to see but which will, in its retrospective account, have rendered our present the grounds of a postcolonial and antifascist utopia. In the 1920s, an incredibly popular new text was taking the world by storm. When read aloud to crowds, riots ensued. Leftist groups circulated copies of it, sometimes illicitly, and met in clandestine settings to discuss it. By the late 1930s, it had profound global political effects, including threatening to topple a fairly stable government and replace it with something entirely new. It was, as one might have guessed, the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita was written, according to most scholarship, around the fifth century BCE. 700 verses in Sanskrit written in a fairly accessible style. It has circulated in South Asia popularly since then. In the nineteenth century, in a long steady move to “protestantize” South Asian religious practice by British scholars, the Gita became analogous to “scripture,” joining the ranks of the Vedas, the Book of Manu, and other early Sanskrit texts, as “the Hindu Bible.”1 But the Gita became the Gita—at least as we know it now—in the 1920s, when it emerged in an idiosyncratic Gujarati interpretation by M. K. Gandhi. The theological-political 1930 Gita was profoundly popular across the world, and offered a new, transcendentally inspired anticolonial politics in the face of the British Raj. Gandhi’s counterintuitive reading—that a dialogue urging a warrior to fight should be the philosophical grounding for a practice of nonviolence—has overshadowed perhaps more textually defensible interpretations. What would become Gandhi’s highly idiosyncratic explication of the Gita began with a chance encounter between the second-year undergraduate and

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two Theosophists, with whom Gandhi began reading Edwin Arnold’s 1885 loose translation (from Sanskrit) of the Gita, The Song Celestial. Gandhi writes in his Autobiography: I had read the divine poem neither in Sanskrit nor in Gujarati. I was constrained to tell them that I had not read the Gita, but that I would gladly read it with them, and that though my knowledge of Sanskrit was meagre, still I hoped to be able to understand the original.2

Gandhi’s lectures on the Gita, which he delivered during the 1920s, relied almost entirely on Arnold’s translation. In his Autobiography, Gandhi notes his failure to finish the text in Sanskrit and quotes Arnold’s translations verbatim.3 My intention here is not to chide Gandhi for relying on English sources.4 The twenty-year-old (and the sixty-year-old) Gandhi considered himself a translator who, as Javed Majeed has shown, self-consciously trafficked in translations that were “always approximate and incomplete.”5 Gandhi’s interest in the Gita might have been the result of a chance encounter in London, but the text was an especially good choice for an aspirational incompetent translator: nothing about the Gita could make sense until there was a “good translation,” which Gandhi was unable to provide because he was never “able to understand the original.”6 Despite Gandhi’s famously “anti-modern” stances, Gandhi’s Gita is “modern” by even the most disciplinarily conservative accounts. It occurs concurrently with textual experiments in London and Paris. It is certainly a response to acceleration, to the shock of the new, and in the wake of “the crisis of the European man,” a response to the particular early twentieth-century “modernity” that recent scholars have forced us to question as possessing a monopoly on the term.7 Gandhi’s Gita features the same literary pastiche and experimentation with form, challenging romanticist notions of authorship that celebrated in contemporaneous European networks. Gandhi’s Gita is modernist, too, in its drive for self-mastery and purification; these are the dangerous ideals it shares with contemporaneous fascist movements in Europe. A focus on Gandhi’s interest in “mastery” has tended to produce superficial readings of his fairly complicated, often contradictory, and frequently muddled, political and ethical thought.8 I have argued elsewhere that Gandhi was aware of the impossibility of “self-mastery.” This is especially evident, as Ajay Skaria has shown, in Gandhi’s original Gujarati (swaraj and satyagraha, among other terms). Totality, mastery, and purity are simultaneously made possible by and safeguarded against the inevitability of failure. In Gandhian terms, this is precisely the point: the satyagrahi must allow himself the possibility of being be gripped (graha) by the wrong satya. Gandhi had no academic intentions and so it is unfair to charge him with poor scholarship. But the curious trajectory of the Gita from 700 BC to 1930 CE frustrated

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many of his opponents (most notably, B. R. Ambedkar, who produced exhaustive histories to dismantle Gandhian Hinduism’s alleged transcendence). We may be additionally frustrated by Gandhi’s reliance on a Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation, given that Arnold was an orientalist philologist in the service of the British Empire. Gandhi’s invention of “tradition” as particularly useful for anticolonial action in the present charted its path through rather murky terrain. But he was hardly alone in his uses and abuses of history for the living present. Gandhi’s recuperation of “Hindu tradition” seems at first glance at odds with revolutionary anticolonial activists like Bhagat Singh, who dismissed tradition as the accumulation of authority. Bhagat Singh’s infamous cry, inqilab zindabad, declares revolution for the perpetual present, a never-ending “now,” against the authoritative weight of history.9 Nevertheless, the “cult of the bomb,” in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army’s 1910 defense, declares violence on the present in order to revive—not avenge—the past. Instead, impatient politics is a constant and consistent demand for revolution—inqilab zindabad—and therefore in line with a total reformulation of an historical imagination. Before Bhagat Singh, Lala Har Dayal revived nineteenth-century liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer for use against the British Empire.10 Bhagat Singh’s extensive reading habits drew on a proliferation of sources, taken out of their historical context, for use in the revolutionary present.11 The scholarly impulse, in analyses of anticolonial figures like Gandhi and Bhagat Singh, has been to rigorously historicize the decade in which they were writing. This historicization has been exhaustive and empirical. At the same time, presentism has been a problem that has dogged the histography of anticolonialism since Indian and Pakistani independence. Chris Moffat has written an account of how Bhagat Singh’s legacy (his corpse) has been taken up for promiscuous use in the present, across the South Asian political spectrum. Presentism is “morally complacent and methodologically suspect,” as Wai Chi Dimock has recently written.12 If we are too eager to find clues about our own political moment from the colonial archive, we will miss the specificity of both. The interwar period is especially murky, marked not only by a self-conscious rupture from its own demarcated past, but also its erasure and foreclosure by World War II, decolonization, and the Cold War. The subjects of this moment think and operate in political vocabularies fairly foreign to the ones we use today, even though the words might have remained the same. But anticolonial thought, from Gandhi to Bhagat Singh, posits a key problem: to historicize it is to recognize there were no better presentists than radical anticolonial activsts, for whom all of literature and history for up for the taking. To historicize the revolutionaries requires us to embrace their presentism. To recuperate them for the present requires us to return to them the global vibrancy of their historical moment. In response, this chapter attempts to chart a course, drawing

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on anticolonial presentism, for a viable and useful presentism for world literary and historical analyses. “Presentism” is the name usually given to an historical and literary error: it is an analysis motivated by present concerns rather than an objective analysis of historical conditions. In her 2002 presidential address at the American Historical Association meeting, Lynn Hunt describes presentism as “a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation” that sets the past up for failure under today’s rubrics.13 In response, she offers, a proper historical approach might restore “wonder” to history, not requiring it to predict its future just as we cannot predict ours. But people in the past were attempting to predict the future, and act towards its realization. Those futures might have been utopian, fuzzily imagined, faulty, or horrific—they were likely, more often than not, not “correct”—but a sense of future judgment has frequently justified or motivated action. There have also been equally robust defenses of presentism, which has been recuperated as the necessary corrective to an encyclopedic historicism. Its most prominent and vocal advocate has been the V21 Collective, which issued a “manifesto” of theses for the study of Victorian literature in the twenty-first century. The target of the Collective’s critique is “positivist historicism,” which does “little more than exhaustively describe, preserve, and display the past.”14 The dichotomies that have dogged the field of literary study—most notably, “theory” against “history”—might be undone, the Collective claims, by way of a “strategic presentism.”15 Nevertheless, the dismissal of positivist historical description seems as unsatisfactory as its assertion; the “strategically presentist” critic is too authoritative and too self-knowing, but occupies the same aloof, potentially ironic, position that the droll historian does. Thinking the present in contrapuntal relationship with the past has been the longstanding work of postcolonial studies. Most work in postcolonial studies has refused to think “history” and “theory” separately; the best work in the field has always envisioned “the world” as its scope. The trajectory of Edward Said’s career— perpetually returning, in various guises, to Erich Auerbach and Giambattista Vico—is exemplary of this type of thought. Said’s conjoined intellectual genealogies—of anticolonial thought on one hand and philological scholarship on the other—afforded him a peculiar commitment to humanism and democratic thought as essential to worldly, secular critique. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan has argued that postcolonial studies might invoke “strategic presentism” in order to produce rigorous historicity in the service of rigorous futurity: Strategic presentism demands awareness of how the anticipated future inflects our conceptualizations of the history of the present. [It] requires developing a literary studies that

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is not only post-historicist but also always rigorously futurist—our goal being not only a historical literary studies for and in the present, but a future literary studies, and a future for literary studies, an unfolding history.16

What kinds of historical and literary analyses in the present are required for a “rigorously futurist” orientation? To be committed to a future world under the rubrics of the postcolonial studies involves, for Srinivasan, thinking world history and literature in the context of the Anthropocene. Organized around concerns with “slow violence” and “great derangements,” to act in the present is to act on behalf of a future (and to imagine a future whose history will struggle to account for our present).17 The future of the Anthropocene, however, is a future without us (the anthros). What type of world literature or world history is conducive for imagining a world that we will not live to see? Srinivasan’s provocations draw our attention to the curious adjective that has attended to the defense of presentism: “strategic.” “Strategic presentism,” with its sly nod to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (playful) call for “strategic essentialism,” is already a future-oriented presentism, a presentism with strategy is one that imagines a success in the future and thus may be held responsible to a regime of investments and evaluations. Strategic presentism suggests that the values of humanistic inquiry are values to-be-accrued: a pay-off for our critique at some point in a predictable future (in the sense that we assume its values will remain ours). But the Anthropocene posits, on the contrary, a fairly unknowable future. Or, more likely, it posits a future we do not want. We might be able to theorize how to act on behalf a future we hope for, but how do we act on behalf a future we dread? To the extent that it is predictable, there will be no one around to measure our predictions’ successes or failures. A presentist critique organized the logics of eventual accrual in a future world is, ironically, the product of the presentism that Hunt dismisses in her 2002 Presidential Address. Not content with our own judgement of past actions, we render our actions for judgment by future critics. In addition to making us the teleological beneficiaries of history, this future-oriented presentism posits biological and heterosexual continuity: analysis as inheritance. Instead, we might imagine a non-strategic presentism: criticism that is experimentally and tentatively world-grasping. Severing our commitment to biological reproduction (either individually or species-wide), this radical presentism does not languish in the easy rejection of an unknowable future, but nor does it act under any assurances or guarantees. This form of radically presentist critique posits an anti-nihilist non-futurity.Two notable thinkers have identified this anti-nihilist non-futurity as an “aporia.” In Aniket Jaaware’s brilliant reconsideration of caste (and B. R. Ambedkar), this aporia is marked by the fact that “all forms of social

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action and the ethics supporting them remain caught” in “the danger… of thinking of the future as an inevitable continuation of the present and ignoring the radical unknowability of it and in a blithe spirit of continuing only to do what is right from the present point of view or making the future so different as to not know how to reach it.”18 David Marriot, in his moving analysis of Frantz Fanon’s thought, argues that thinking “aporia” is the only mode of thought conducive to Fanonian psychopolitics, which is “to know a thought that is not yet.”19 Marriot is rightly frustrated with analyses of Fanon that take him to be a thinker of teleology, of resolved questions, and of historical Aufhebung. On the contrary, Fanon is a thinker of the “discontinuous present.” “It is this historical awareness of the present as necessarily self-interrupting, as irrevocably ruptured and discontinuous, that leads Fanon inexorably to a concern with a temporality diametrically opposed to that of narrative,” Marriot writes. Fanon theorizes world history for the wretched of the earth as “for a teleology without telos,” “the necessary interruption of all thought of purpose or final ends,” and “the tabula rasa does resist any narrative or archeological schema that would reduce it to a final meaning.”20 A radical anticolonial presentism, in an aporia, is therefore non-strategic: it is experimentation in the fleeting moment. Conscripted to participate in a world they had not chosen, anticolonial and exiled thinkers nevertheless endeavored to imagine that world otherwise. David Scott has shown how these future postcolonial worlds were both romantically emancipatory and mired in deep tragedy.21 For Scott, postcolonial studies, as the benefactor of these anticolonial imagined futures, has erred toward the romantic; as a correction, Scott argues that postcolonial futures must recuperate tragedy as the genre of the anticolonial imagination. A vision of a postcolonial future, both alluring and grievous, stands at the center of most anticolonial thought. But it was a future that many anticolonial thinkers knew they would never inhabit. Anticolonial thought was written in exile, on deathbeds, in abjection, or in the face of “declined experience.”22 Antiimperial thinkers did not simply write narratives of romance or tragedy. They sought vocabulary that could properly capture both the grandiose utopianism and self-effacing acquiescence necessary to imagine a world that they would not live to see. They attempted to create a language sufficient to imagine political collectivities motivated by the very fact of their current impossibility. They invented aesthetic forms necessary to imagine a worldwide egalitarianism rooted in the unlikelihood of any future at all.23 To recuperate anticolonial critique as a mode of presentism requires us to think world history and world literature less as “world-making” and more as “world-grasping.” This is what Erich Auerbach called “Wirklichkeitsauffassung”: a mode of criticism committed to accounting for a “reality” that “is diametrically

208 j. daniel elam

opposed to locating, let alone supplying, definitive answers. Instead, it invites endless interpretation and speculation.”24 The name of this project, in Auerbach’s philological tradition (and the one that comparative literature in North America was to cultivate after World War II), was Weltliteratur (“world literature”). Weltliteratur has borne, from the moment of its storied inception, the simultaneous weight of an aesthetic and political claim. B. Venkat Mani’s succinct definition of Weltliteratur offers a crucial insight to conceiving the importance of the agglutinative neologism: it is the name that makes possible critical claims to literature as self-consciously “historically conditioned, culturally determined, and politically charged.”25 In 1827, a geriatric Goethe was unable to conceive of Chinese aesthetics without questioning the boundary of the German nation, and thus coined the term at dinner with his assistant Johannes Eckermann. For Marx and Engels, the emergence of Weltliteratur was an augur for a communist revolution against an expanding capitalist world market (Weltmarkt).26 Although there is no technical flaw in the literal English translation, “world literature,” the lack of agglutination in its anglophone iteration has given scholars a reason to believe that “world” and “literature” should, or can, be thought separately.27 This has produced exciting recent work, but the recuperation of “world literature” has been curiously invested in imagining the “world” in its totality, and therefore its “literature” as a fully knowable body of work, over which one might eventually attain mastery. David Damrosch’s alluringly pithy definition—“all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin”28—has been taken to imply a finite list of texts rather than Borges’s overwhelmingly infinite “total library.”29 Recent debates about world literature (and world history) have insisted on regimes of mastery and knowability, or, in lieu of that, containment and recognizability. To proffer a few examples from the first regime: the world is a “world-system,” “the sum of all forms of literary expression in all the world’s languages,” “one and unequal,” a “unity and permanence,” a “regime of enforced mobility,” a “finite set of entities and relations,” an “ecology,” a “self-organizing, self-enclosed, and self-referential totality,” a “universal spirit.”30 Concerningly, most of these conceptions of “the world,” are mobilized with reference to Heidegger, whose worlding (welten) forces are fully aligned with domination and conquest. “World literature” under these rubrics is a project that shares the logics of colonial exploration and exploitation.31 The second regime, of containment and recognizability, can be largely summarized by reference to the ongoing debates concerning canonicity in the wake of “new critical humanities” literary interventions in the 1980s and 1990s. Even before then, Rene Wellek’s lectures in the 1960s and 1970s are scattered with jokes, sometimes bilious, against the predominance of French literature masquerading as worldly enough, and argued for the importance of paying attention to literatures

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beyond Europe. Accumulation and expansion of world literary and historical knowledge are necessary endeavors, to be sure, but not without a pernicious logic. This is the “world” made possible by what Pascale Casanova calls littérisation, the process by which texts become literature; or, framed differently, the granting of literary recognition to texts. Practically speaking, this has tended to involve writers from the formerly colonized world to beg for recognition on the grounds that they are, in fact, the “Zulu Tolstoy” of Saul Bellow’s xenophobic diatribe. Pheng Cheah, in his vituperative response to negative student course evaluations, offers the clearest example of this: “V. S. Naipaul is a Nobel laureate, and [Nuruddin] Farah is rumored to be a perennial Nobel contender…. My students’ comments are patently Eurocentric.”32 His students’ mere dislike of the reading list seems, to my mind, considerably less Eurocentric than relying on the Swedish Academy to define what “literature” is. “World literature” and “world history” as closed (even if expandable) sets not only produces an unsatisfactory object of analysis. It reproduces the very logics of imperial control that an anti-oppressive world analyses would presumably want to avoid. In his 1952 essay “Die Philologie der Weltliteratur” (“The Philology of World Literature”), Erich Auerbach identifies this problem instantly: if a complete, total, and mastered world were to be realized, “the idea of world literature would simultaneously be realized and destroyed.”33 Heideggerian “world-making” is therefore a disconcerting basis on which to conceive of humanistic inquiry. We might recover, instead, a strain of naïve presentist critique of both literature and history that insists instead on “world-grasping.” I mean “critique” here in the sense of its more capacious German genealogy (Kritik), therefore more or less synonymous with “criticism,” and certainly indebted here to Walter Benjamin’s lifelong cultivation of the term. To recall, Benjamin attempted to develop a form of aesthetic criticism suitable for political action in the present. Benjamin’s sense of criticism was the product of an idiosyncratic alchemy: Kant tempered by Schegel and Goethe; Schegel and Goethe catalyzed by Marx; Marx pushed to crisis by Brecht.34 In short, Benjaminian criticism is a recalcitrance against Enlightenment assurance (Kant’s Aufklarung) in favor of enchantment and wonder (Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt), but nevertheless compelled (contra Goethe and Schegel) by the emergency of the worldly political present (Schmitt’s Ausnahmezustand). It is not a practice, therefore, of Kantian critical “maturity” but one of experience (Erlebnis) and encounter, too fleeting and ephemeral to “mature” at all. A re-enchanted, immature critique relies on imagination (“to read what has never been written”) to imagine radical, pessimistic but utopian, politics (“a revolutionary chance to fight for the oppressed past”) which is fleeting (a memory that “flashes up at a moment of danger”).35 It is, additionally, a practice of self-erasure and of enabling “the masses” to cultivate, as masses, a form

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of aesthetic-political critique. Correctly so, Philip Weinstein has described this as “unknowing.”36 Benjamin’s practice of criticism is, if not impossible, infeasible; that Benjamin continued to hone his techniques attests less to a practice of mastery and more to a practice of in-expertise: an attempt to become even more immature, even more enchanted, even more utopian, often to the embarrassment of his colleagues. Benjamin began his graduate work in philology but switched to philosophy, and attempted to combine both in his work on German tragedy. In an essay on “The Theory of Criticism,” Benjamin wrote that philosophy aspires for unity, but philology aspires to be awed.37 In a response Adorno’s criticism that his work was too naïve, Benjamin begins to trace the contours of a philological critical orientation: “a ‘wide-eyed presentation of the facts’” characterizes “the true philological attitude.” Philology “magically fixates the reader” on a text, “whose exorcism is reserved for philosophy.”38 In an earlier essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin asserts the need for a critique which “stops short, however—as if in awe of the work, but equally from respect for the truth.”39 Where the critic stops, regimes of mastery continue. For Benjamin, critique grasps beauty in “the impossibility of unveiling,” rather than the alleged benefits of discovering what is “underneath.”40 In contrast, recall the brutality with which the French demanded an “Algeria unveiled,” in Frantz Fanon’s detailed account.41 Where the critic revels in unknowing, the expert is driven murderously mad by the alleged “secret” being withheld from him. The expert defines unknown and anonymous others by the his inability to “possess” (and to penetrate) them. The critic, in contrast, stops in naïve awe before unknown and unpossessable others. Stopping short, in awe: these are the prerequisites for an immature critique, necessary for an inexpert project. Though the two bodies of work appear at first glance to be unrelated, revolutionary anticolonialism and philology share more than mere contemporaneity. Comparative philology and anticolonial political thought were both committed to envisioning a new “world” in response to, and from underneath, the horrors of fascism and colonialism, that a future “literature” and “history” was to imagine, inherit, and create. Anticolonialism and philology, in the 1920s and 1930s, understood their object of transformation to be nothing less than the world. Bhagat Singh, in conversation with leftist radicals in the US and Europe, imagined a “universal brotherhood.”42 Har Dayal settled for no utopia smaller than a “World-State” of friendship. Gandhi sought to rebuild the world from its minor philosophies— aestheticism, vegetarianism, Theosophy—even if in a makeshift vocabulary.43 Benjamin’s critic could not rest until all the dead had been rescued from the enemy.44 Fanon demanded the end of the world. Auerbach theorized a worldly philology conducive for Weltliteratur—not simply “world literature,” but rather a worldly literature, a literature worthy of worldliness—whose “philological home is earth.”45

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The only certainty that any of these thinkers possessed about this “world,” however, was that it was uncertain and, moreover, likely impossible. Bhagat Singh’s “universal brotherhood” demanded “chaos” and assured death. Gandhi’s philosophies were rooted in perpetual failure and loss. The citizens of Har Dayal’s “World-State” were the descendants of the present, but they inherited an impossible past. Fanon offered the world an invitation to be his “comrades,” knowing that his invitation would be misunderstood. The actualization of a true “world literature,” Auerbach wrote, would mark the end of the world. Anticolonial presentism thus names experimentations whose goals were not and could not be exhausted by any teleological outcome—namely, national independence—but rather revolutionary projects that took place in the perpetual present, or imagined no end or final realization. This sense of revolution, perhaps best captured in the HSRA phrase inqilab zindabad, was committed to a world that should be otherwise, but what that “otherwise” might look like was grounds for perpetual trial and experimentation, not knowability and predictability. Philological presentism, similarly, operates in conditions of scarcity, deficiency, and incompletion. Recall that Auerbach’s tentative form of Vico-inspired criticism took its fullest shape in what René Wellek once described as a “personal commonplace or rather an uncommonplace book”: Mimesis.46 Wellek’s admittedly tepid praise is nevertheless illuminating. The allegedly monumental work of philological critique is a collection of fragments and synecdochal analyses, culled from makeshift libraries.47 Mimesis famously offers neither theoretical method nor promise, despite the formalist New Critics who assured themselves its method was theirs.48 It is also self-consciously presentist, as Auerbach was to make clear in a response to his critics: “Mimesis is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s.”49 James Porter and Seth Lerer have shown, in different ways, the productive presentism of Auerbach’s criticism.50 These forms of presentism, anticolonial and philological, “[do] not seek to absolve the world of its unknowability, does not seek the incontestable, but submits its knowledge to the precariousness of living beings making history,” in Stathis Gourgouris’s description of Saidian secular criticism.51 Anticolonial and philological critique relies on a history that, in W. E. B. DuBois’s words in his Dark Princess, traces “not facts merely, but inner currents and whisperings, unpublished facts,” or a history that finds merit in what Leela Gandhi has called, in another context, “conscientious… skilled fictionalizing and conjecture.”52 It elaborates on and speculates about the world that historicist empiricism has illuminated. Radical presentism in this sense might push beyond corroboration as the only academic response to the past. Departing from a clean history of ideas, and on behalf of an anti-canon of literary thought, radically presentist world-grasping might trace disorderly histories,

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promiscuous modes of thought, impossible transformations, and improvisational adjacencies.53 This is what Kandice Chuh has beautifully described as “illiberal humanisms,” which foreground “relationality and entanglement rather than individuality and autochthony.”54 To the extent that presentism is intellectual lazy, the radical presentism I have attempted to theorize here is self-consciously in-expert. Aniket Jaaware, in a different but not unrelated context, suggests the neologism oublierr—a portmanteau of oublier (to forget) and to err. “It is erring both because author and readers command, and will remember or recall, earlier instances of related, similar, contrasting, and/or complementary thoughts, some of which, to be sure, the author is not aware.”55 Radical presentism is critique as commitment. Commitment, Theodor Adorno wrote in a posthumously published essay, is a plea for a world that might, and should, be otherwise.56 But this world is one we cannot know in advance. If we are to properly account for revolutionary world histories and radical world literatures, we will require radical methodologies. I suggest we begin we start by taking these thinkers at their own word: what might it mean to begin from a place of unknowing and end at a place of unknowability? This might provide us the guidelines to account for the aporia of the present not as the conclusion to the past, nor as something to be overcome in the future, but rather the basis for which a radical presentist orientation towards the world has been, and can be, envisioned.

Notes 1

See J. B. Scott, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and T. Masuzawa, The invention of world religions or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

2

M. K. (Mahatma) Gandhi, An Autobiography: Or, the Story of my Experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948), chapter 14.

3

See Chapter 52 in Gandhi’s Autobiography. That Gandhi’s Gita is largely Anglophone (with its sources going back to William Jones) is more proof that philology’s affiliations are neither straightforwardly “colonial” nor “nationalist” but rather multitudinous and unpredictable.

4

Just as Derrida is the Derrida of postcolonial thought, a tangential conclusion to E. W. Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) might argue that English, German, and French are the languages of oriental scholarship.

5

J. Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 289; 239; 241.

6

Majeed, Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity, 241.

7

See S. S. Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) and D. Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

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8

J. Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

9

See C. Moffat, “Experiments in Political Truth” Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2013): 185–201.

10

J. D. Elam, “Echoes of Ghadr: Lala Har Dayal and the Time of Anticolonialism,” Comparative Studies

11

J. D. Elam, “Commonplace Anti-Colonialism: Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook and the Politics of

in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, 1 (2014): 9–23. Reading,” South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies 39 (September 2016): 1–16. 12

Dimock, “Editor’s Column: Historicism, Presentism, Futurism,” PMLA 133, 2 (2018): 257–263.

13

L. Hunt, “Against Pesentism,” https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspec�tives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism.

14

http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/.

15

See C. Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward A New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48, 4 (2006): 625–57; a 2018 MLA panel at the New York Annual Convention on 6 January 2018 titled “Strategic Presentism” explored these issues.

16

Srinivasan, 2018 MLA panel, quoted in Dimock, “Editor’s Column: Historicism, Presentism, Futurism,” 261.

17

R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013) and A. Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

18

A. Jaaware, Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 117–118.

19

D. Marriot, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 363.

20

Marriot, Whither Fanon, 28–29.

21

D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); T. Asad, “Conscripts of Western Modernity,” in C. Gailey, ed., Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond: Civilization in Crisis (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992), 333–351.

22

A.-L. François, Open Secrets (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), xvi.

23

I want to foreground here that I am not arguing that there is “no future,” in Lee Edelman’s formulation. It is precisely against what has since been dubbed “antisocial theory” that this project is set. Futures here are not absent—most of the time, they are actively imagined—but they are non-falsifiable futures: unguaranteed, unsecured, unpredictable.

24

J. I. Porter, “Disfigurations: Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura,” Critical Inquiry 44 (Autumn 2017):

25

B. V. Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New

103. Wirklichkeitsauffassung is in Auerbach, Mimesis [German edition], 16. York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 13. 26

August Willhelm Schlegel used the term in his 1801-1803 lectures and Christoph Martin Wieland theorized Weltliteratur in the context of ancient Rome in 1801.

27

Guillén suggests “literature of the world” as the best English translation of Weltliteratur in C. Guillén, Challenge of comparative literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

28

D. Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 4.

29

“Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves—shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies—ever reward them with a tolerable page,” from J. L. Borges, “La biblioteca total,” (The Total Library) Sur 59 (August 1939), in E. Weinberger, ed., Selected Non-Fictions, Trans. E. Allen, S. J. Levine, and E. Weinberger (New York: Penguin: 1999), 214–217.

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30

F. Moretti, Modern Epic: the World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (New York: Verso, 1995); E. Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013), 2; P. Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 2; A. Mufti, Forget English? Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 9; D. Ganguly, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 21; A. Beecroft, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present (New York: Verso, 2015); E. Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 32; Rabindranath Tagore, “World Literature,” quoted in Ganguly, This Thing Called the World, 76. See also C. Levine and B. V. Mani, “What Counts as World Literature?,” Modern Language Quarterly, 74, 2 (1 June 2013): 141–149.

31

See also W. C Dimock’s “The Literary Scramble for Africa,” 17 February 2015, https://www.chroni� cle.com/blogs/conversation/2015/02/17/a-literary-scramble-for-africa/.

32

Cheah, What is a World, 15. See also R. T. Srinivasan, “Divisions of Labor: Between Cheah’s Worlds,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, 1 (2016): 243–261.

33

E. Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 254.

34

For a detailed account of these jumps and shifts, see P. U. Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

35

W. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1968), 254, 263, 255.

36

P. Weinstein, Unknowing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 254. See also J. Habermas, “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique,” in G. Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 90–128.

37

W. Benjamin, “The Theory of Criticism” in H. Eiland and G. Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1: 1913-1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

38

W. Benjamin, “Reply,” in T. Adorno, W. Benjamin, E. Bloch, B. Brecht, and G. Lukács, Aesthetics and

39

W. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in H. Eiland and G. Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin:

Politics (London: Verso, 2007), 146–153. Selected Writings, 1: 1913-1926, 334. The possibility of knowing this “truth,” however, should remain perpetually foreclosed. 40

Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 351.

41

F. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1994).

42

Simona Sawhney and I discuss this in greater detail. See S. Sawhney, “Death in Three Scenes of Recitation,” Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2013): 202–215 and J. D. Elam, “The ‘arch Priestess of Anarchy’ Visits Lahore: Violence, Love, and the Worldliness of Revolutionary Texts,” Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2013): 140–154.

43

For a discussion of these circuitously sympathetic anticolonial politics, see L. Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

44

W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Illuminations, Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–264.

45

E. Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” Centennial Review 13,1 (Winter 1969): 1–17; E. Auerbach, “Philology der Weltliteratur,” in W. Muschg, ed. Weltliteratur; Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag (Bern: Francke, 1952), 39–50. Edward Said and Marie Said produced the first English translation of this essay (1969), but it is not a particularly good translation. The English translation to consult is in E. Auerbach, “The Philology of World Literature,” in J. I. Porter and J. O. Newman, eds., Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

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46

Quoted in S. Lerer, “Auerbach’s Shakespeare,” Philological Quarterly 90, 1 (2011): 24.

47

Auerbach’s dramatic claim that there were no libraries in Istanbul has been the subject of much academic debate. For our purposes here, we may say simply that the validity of this claim is both non-existent and irrelevant.

48

See S. Lerer, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 241.

49 50

Auerbach, Mimesis, 574. See J. I. Porter, “Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 115–147 and S. Lerer, Error and the Academic Self.

51

S. Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 22–24.

52

W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1995 [1927]), 20; L. Gandhi, “Mission Statement Responses,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 33, 2 (2013): 156.

53

See, especially, the work of: S. V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019); A. Gordon, The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018); and A. Z. Newton, To Make the Hands Impure: Art, Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). See also E. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); H. Bhabha, “Introduction to the 1986 Edition,” in F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2017), xxi–xxxvii.

54

K. Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘after Man,’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 5.

55

Jaaware, Practicing Caste, 3.

56

T. Adorno, “Commitment,” New Left Review 1 (1974): 87–88.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. “Commitment.” New Left Review 1 (1974): 87–88. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013. Asad, Talal. “Conscripts of Western Modernity.” In Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond: Civilization in Crisis, edited by Christine Gailey, 333–351. Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992. Auerbach, Erich. “Philology der Weltliteratur.” In Weltliteratur; Festgabe für Fritz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Walter Muschg, 39–50. Bern: Francke, 1952. ———. “Philology and Weltliteratur. ” Translated by Maire and Edward Said. The Centennial Review 13, 1 (Winter 1969), 1–17. ———. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. ———. “The Philology of World Literature.” In Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, edited by James I. Porter and Jane O. Newman. Trans. Jane O. Newman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Beecroft, Alexander. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Verso, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 253–264.

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———. “The Theory of Criticism.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, edited by Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926, edited by Howard Eiland and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. “Reply.” In Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukács, Aesthetics and Politics, 146–153. New York: Verso, 2020. Bloch, Ernst. The Spirit of Utopia. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bhabha, Homi. “Introduction to the 1986 Edition.” In Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, xxi–xxxvii. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Borges, Jorge Luis. “La biblioteca total.” [The Total Library] Sur 59 (August 1939). In Selected Non-Fictions. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books, 1999, 214–217. ———. Selected Non-Fictions. Translated by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot Weinberger. Edited by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Chuh, Kandice. The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities ‘after Man.’ Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Dimock, Wai Chi. “The Literary Scramble for Africa.” 17 February 2015. https://www.chronicle.com/ blogs/conversation/2015/02/17/a-literary-scramble-for-africa. ———. “Editor’s Column: Historicism, Presentism, Futurism.” PMLA 133, 2 (2018): 257–263. Du Bois, W. E. B., Dark Princess. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1995 [1928]. Elam, J. Daniel. “The ‘arch Priestess of Anarchy’ Visits Lahore: Violence, Love, and the Worldliness of Revolutionary Texts.” Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2013): 140–154. ______. “Echoes of Ghadr: Lala Har Dayal and the Time of Anticolonialism.” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, 1 (2014): 9–23. ———. “Commonplace Anti-Colonialism: Bhagat Singh’s Jail Notebook and the Politics of Reading.” South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies 39 (September 2016): 1–16. Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 1994. François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ———. “Mission Statement Responses.” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 33, 2 (2013): 155–156. Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma). An Autobiography: Or, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1948. Ganguly, Debjani. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Gaonkar, Dilip, ed. Alternative Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Gordon, Avery. The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Gourgouris, Stathis. Lessons in Secular Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

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Guillén, Claudio. Challenge of comparative literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Habermas, Jürgen. “Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique.” In On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, edited by Gary Smith, 90–128. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019. Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. The Institution of Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Hunt, Lynn. “Against Presentism.” AHA Perspectives on History, 1 May 2002. https://www.historians. org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2002/against-presentism. Jaaware, Aniket. Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Lerer, Seth. Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ——— “Auerbach’s Shakespeare.” Philological Quarterly 90, 1 (2011): 21–44. Levine, Caroline. “Strategic Formalism: Toward A New Method in Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies 48, 4 (2006): 625–57. Levine, Caroline and B. Venkat Mani, “What Counts as World Literature?” Modern Language Quarterly 74, 2 (1 June 2013): 141–149. Majeed, Javed. Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Mani, B. Venkat. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. “Manifesto of the V21 Collective.” http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses. Marriot, David. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Masuzawa, Tomoko. The invention of world religions or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism. Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Moffat, Chris. “Experiments in Political Truth” Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2013): 185–201. Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: the World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez. New York: Verso, 1995. Mufti, Aamir. Forget English? Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Newton, Adam Zachary. To Make the Hands Impure: Art, Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Porter, James I. “Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology.” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 115–147. ——— and Jane O. Newman, eds. Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. ——— “Disfigurations: Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura.” Critical Inquiry 44 (Autumn 2017): 80–113. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978 Sawhney, Simona. “Death in Three Scenes of Recitation.” Postcolonial Studies 16, 2 (2013): 202–215. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Scott, J. Barton. Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule. Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

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Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor. “Divisions of Labor: Between Cheah’s Worlds.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 25, 1 (2016): 243–261. Weinstein, Philip. Unknowing. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.

CHAPTER 9

Liberating World Literature: Alex La Guma in Exile Christopher J. Lee

Abstract This chapter revisits the life and work of South African writer and activist Alex La Guma (19251985) to examine the circuits between liberation struggles and the writing of world literature. Born in Cape Town, La Guma grew up in a political family and joined the Communist Party of South Africa in his early twenties. He later became involved with the South African Coloured People’s Organisation—a member of the Congress Alliance headed by the African National Congress— during the 1950s, and he left for exile in 1966 after a period of imprisonment and house arrest. Before leaving, La Guma began publishing fiction, including A Walk in the Night (1962) and And a Threefold Cord (1964). While in exile, his work appeared in international journals including Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, Tricontinental, Presence Africaine, and Moscow News. This chapter traces this evolution in La Guma’s career to underscore the connections between anticolonial activism and the creation of world literature during the latter half of the twentieth century.

Keywords: South Africa; Anti-apartheid Struggle; Anticolonialism; Decolonization; Communist Internationalism; Afro-Asianism

The South African writer and activist Alex La Guma (1925-85) departed Cape Town for exile in 1966, an extended period which ended with his premature death in Havana, Cuba, at the age of sixty. He never witnessed the achievement of non-racial democracy in the country of his birth. Yet his experience sheds light on the role that exile has had in shaping South Africa’s literary, political, and intellectual life. La Guma shared this experience with many during the anti-apartheid struggle—thousands went abroad either temporarily or permanently—yet it remains incompletely examined as a historical phenomenon. Existing scholarship by Stephen Ellis, Hugh Macmillan and Thula Simpson, for example, has focused primarily on party organization, diplomatic efforts and life among lower-level recruits within the Frontline States and elsewhere.1 Though committed to this broader effort, La Guma’s exile casts a different light on the complexity of this condition for individuals—the constant vulnerabilities of being a political émigré, the strength derived from

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common cause with other activists, and the day-to-day intellectual labor involved in building a transnational movement. Exile was a time of both political uncertainty and personal freedom, a liminal status of forcibly becoming an outsider while still retaining the commitments of an insider. It is a situation of tension and paradox that could both suppress the imagination but also unleash new forms of creativity. As Edward Said has written, exile is both a terrible fate and an ideal vantage point for the intellectual.2 This chapter revisits La Guma’s experience of exile in order to readdress this essential theme of South Africa’s anti-apartheid history. This chapter also revisits this time in La Guma’s life to better understand his writing in exile and how it contributed to an emergent world literature informed and shaped by global decolonization and the Cold War. His diverse body of exile writing reveals a wide transnational landscape beyond South Africa, of an incipient Third World that impacted his career as it did South Africa’s liberation politics. Indeed, La Guma’s exile writing restores a frequently neglected dimension of work: his non-fiction. Over the course of nearly two decades, he wrote numerous literary essays, book reviews, travel reportage, conference reports, political tracts, letters to the editor and occasional short stories—all of which might be called the written ephemera of exile. His work appeared in such venues as Sechaba, The African Communist, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, Tricontinental, Présence Africaine, and Moscow News. The African National Congress, the South African Communist Party, the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), and other organizations, state and non-state alike, published these journals.3 Based around the world, these publications fostered audiences in Cairo, London, Paris, Moscow, Havana, and elsewhere, constituting a counter-public—and now counter-archive—against Western neocolonialism and its various activities. These periodicals contributed to wide-ranging print cultures during the Cold War that sustained political dissidents and exiled writers like La Guma. They equally fostered writers who would go on to define the substance and parameters of world literature beyond the Euro-American West.4 In summary, through the example of Alex La Guma, this chapter argues that the emergence of world literature as a twentieth-century genre must take account of the role of activist imaginaries in its making, as manifested through small magazines, the significant role of non-fiction, and the common experience of exile.

Fiction and Non-Fiction in the Life of Alex La Guma Despite the geographic reach of La Guma’s exile writings and their consequent potential for universal meaning beyond South Africa, the assorted essays, reviews, and stories he published while a political émigré have largely been rendered invisible with the passage of time. Indeed, these writings complement La Guma’s neglected edited

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volume, Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans (1971). Two important posthumous collections—a volume of writings and interviews edited by Cecil Abrahams, entitled Memories of Home (1991), and La Guma’s pre-exile journalism gathered by Roger Field and André Odendaal in Liberation Chabalala: The World of Alex La Guma (1993)—have further underscored the vital role of non-fiction throughout La Guma’s career.5 With his highest level of formal education being secondary school, La Guma cut his literary teeth by writing for leftist newspapers, particularly New Age (Cape Town) and Fighting Talk (Johannesburg). These formative efforts in journalism proved essential to his later fictional depictions of social and political life in Cape Town through such celebrated works as A Walk in the Night (1962), And a Threefold Cord (1964), The Stone Country (1967) and In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (1972)—the first, third and fourth being canonized through their inclusion in the prestigious African Writers Series edited by Chinua Achebe.6 During his lifetime, La Guma received a number of awards, including the Lotus Prize for Literature and the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples, and he was named a French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He posthumously received the Order of Ikhamanga in Gold from the South African government in 2003, nearly twenty years after his passing.7 Despite this acclaim, La Guma’s non-fiction has been an underappreciated, though indispensable, aspect of his writing life. It provided a first draft for his fiction. As Es’kia Mphahlele, a fellow writer and friend, has written, journalism tests the balance between “writing as self-expression and writing as objective reporting of the social scene.”8 La Guma’s non-fiction reflects this tension, lending an immediate impression of his politics, artistic concerns, and personal life. La Guma can be understood as an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, having grown up in the working-class neighborhood of District Six in Cape Town during the Great Depression and experiencing his intellectual development through factory work, trade union organizing, and politically minded parents, especially his father James (Jimmy) La Guma, who was an important figure within the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), the original iteration of the party founded in 1921 before it became the SACP in 1953. La Guma’s best-known books and stories—especially his first novel, A Walk in the Night, which fixed District Six within South African literature—drew from this personal background. They also spoke to the immediacy of the political moment. An activist since joining the Young Communist League in 1947, La Guma published A Walk in the Night during an intense period after the Treason Trial (1956-1961), in which he was one of the 156 accused, and the Sharpeville Massacre (1960), which resulted in the banning of the ANC, the Pan Africanist Congress, and other organizations. His second book, And a Threefold Cord, which depicted the plight of shack dwellers on the Cape Flats, was published two years later. He wrote much of his third book, The Stone Country, about prison life under the apartheid regime, during this same period, which were to be his final years in South Africa.

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La Guma achieved this high level of productivity despite experiences of political detention, solitary confinement, and house arrest—disruptive episodes of police brutality he would include in his writing. Indeed, the initial publication of A Walk in the Night in Nigeria and And a Threefold Cord in East Berlin resulted from circumstances of apartheid surveillance and state censorship. This situation fortuitously internationalized his work early on: his first readers were not exclusively South African but consisted of a cosmopolitan audience. His last two novels In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Time of the Butcherbird (1979), written and published while in exile, built upon this initial legacy by continuing to focus on the South African condition, while also being more self-consciously addressed to a global readership. Like many African writers of his generation and after, La Guma came to depend on this bifocal orientation for the success of his work—a duality that exile only reinforced. Indeed, the fact that his work was banned in South Africa throughout his lifetime meant that achieving a global audience was indispensable for financial and political reasons. Global readers sustained his creative productivity, as well as his financial circumstances and his political vitality. Yet the condition of exile imposed an aesthetic choice. His ambition of pursuing a socialist realism in the vein of Maxim Gorky was atrophied by circumstances of distance. This conjoined spatial and artistic predicament restricted his creative ability—only two of his five works of fiction were written overseas. However, it also encouraged him to reinvent himself, to maintain his political and aesthetic commitments by turning to other subject matter, new genres, and literary experimentation. As in his early career, writing non-fiction provided a crucial outlet to report on news developments, to test ideas, to publicize the anti-apartheid struggle, and to develop his writing abilities more generally. In sum, his exile writing tells this story of creative expansion in La Guma’s career, one different from that found in his fiction. By extension, this expansion is suggestive of how world literature might be further defined through the inclusion of non-fiction genres. Through the interaction between his travel and writing, La Guma navigated a scale between local moments and issues and their global implications. His work documented not only his life outside of South Africa but also his contributions to an emergent postcolonial world literature through a dissident aesthetics, a poetics of exile.

Conditions of Absence – Distant Writing and the Exilic Imagination Akin to La Guma’s recognized fiction, his exile writing was frequently informed by the intensity of firsthand observation and a political worldview committed to the South African struggle. It possesses these qualities despite encompassing a global geography ranging from North Vietnam, to Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Cuba, among

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many locales. La Guma was a Third World internationalist in the most direct sense of the expression through travels and residences in places such as Addis Ababa, Algiers, Beirut, Cairo, Dar es Salaam, East Berlin, Hanoi, Kingston, Luanda, Maputo, Moscow, New Delhi, and Tashkent, in addition to his home of Cape Town and his long stay in London from 1966 to 1978. His final years in revolutionary Cuba—a destination and refuge for many activists, like Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)—secured these credentials. Indeed, in addition to the Castro government’s unwavering support for the anti-apartheid cause, Havana’s racial diversity and political outlook bookended La Guma’s beginnings in Cape Town. In these opportune ways, his career demonstrates the vital role that individuals, who emerged from radical politics and served as diplomatic intermediaries for liberation organizations, had in generating and materializing the Third World. La Guma did not view the South African struggle in isolation, but he saw it as part of a broader pattern of global activism that pursued decolonization and fought against racial and economic injustice wherever it existed. His writings remain relevant to present-day discussions of these issues for this basic reason. Exile, of course, is one of the classic themes of world literature. Within African letters it has had the unusual, propitious effect of both restricting many writers from their countries of origin while also enabling successful international careers. La Guma is no exception. Nonetheless, a complex set of tensions emerges in his work between senses of proximity and unfamiliarity, contiguity and detachment, authority and inexpertise—all of which characterize what might be called distant writing. In contrast to his earlier work, La Guma’s exile writing was generated through a view from afar. The concept of distant writing captures this surface problem of geographic estrangement, but it also raises questions about how this predicament of space and alienation informs the engagement of the writer, the affective dimensions of the work produced, and the knowledge imparted—an aesthetic of exile. Such consideration is not reducible to a formula that distance prompts abstraction—a departure from realism. Rather, as La Guma demonstrates, writing can be about seeking solidarity, collapsing geographic distance, and transcending cultural difference as a response to dislocation and exile. Distant writing can exhibit forms of radical empathy—an ethic of identification with political conditions beyond one’s immediate community—with the resulting creative literature constituting a third space between “home” and “exile.”9 This politics of recognition, as witnessed in La Guma’s writing, frequently occurred by ideological predisposition, but also practical necessity—the result of a complex interplay between inexperience and preexisting knowledge that inhabited foreignness. This interplay can be said to rest at the heart of creativity more generally. The concept of distant writing can be further situated through several antecedents that meditate on the uses of “distance.” Mikhail Bakhtin proposed that

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one fundamental difference between the novel and the epic as genres depended on a distinction of time—an “epic distance”—with the novel attentive to the contemporary and the epic preoccupied with a past world of unreachable heroes.10 This temporal “distance,” which related to his idea of the chronotope, pertains to exile with its reciprocal elements of nostalgia, anxiety, and uncertain futures. Exile writing is not solely about space, but also time. Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical approach of defamiliarization, often referred to as an alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), illustrates a second example of distance, in this case as a tool for dispelling the illusions of art and heightening an audience’s political consciousness. Exile writing can produce similar effects by making the foreign familiar, but also the familiar foreign to sharp effect, startling the reader. Finally, Franco Moretti, the closest influence on this provisional concept, has more recently urged the adoption of “distant reading”—a method that reverses the routine technique of “close reading” to demand that literary production be regarded from further spatial, geographic, and systemic remove, allowing for the materialism of literature to be situated and grasped within broader sociopolitical trends of a world system.11 “Distant writing” is an author-focused analog to Moretti’s perspective of the critic. By foregrounding authorial position and intention, this parallel approach can open a space for differentiating a writer’s work based on the immediacy of firsthand experience versus work produced as an effect of systemic conditions of global power—the Cold War in the case of La Guma. In sum, while distant writing may suffer from difficult circumstances, it can also retain the potential for penetrating criticism, measured nostalgia, recasting the familiar, and mapping universal themes, among other merits, that proximity may not inspire. Distant writing is therefore not about location alone—actual distance—but the qualities of writing incurred, consciously or unconsciously, through separation, progressive disconnection, and, at times, permanent remove. This intersectional approach incorporating time, defamiliarization, and the global condition presents one makeshift means for thinking through La Guma’s eclectic oeuvre. It is designed to deconstruct “exile writing” into several component parts and, in doing so, revitalize its possibilities. La Guma’s work in exile not only underscores how he shifted focus, but, by extension, the ways in which African literature was re-invented during the Cold War period. The emergence of the African novel—the paradigmatic genre of the postcolonial period—was attended by smaller genres like reportage, the personal essay, conference presentations, speeches, and the book review that, in turn, went beyond the confines of the nation-state. An anti-hierarchical view that accounts for and critically engages with these alternative literary forms is needed. Indeed, the notion of distant writing explains the neglect of La Guma’s work in exile—why these assorted pieces have remained largely absent from popular discussions of his writing, despite their

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commitment to broader themes of the human condition. They risked irrelevance through less familiar modes and content, through their attempts at depicting global experiences with universal meanings. Yet, approached in contrapuntal fashion, they productively expand the concerns of his South African fiction through new themes, genres, and geographies.12 To examine the corpus of his exile writing more deeply, his earliest work was published in 1967, shortly after he left South Africa, and it was openly political in orientation—a luxury that exile provided, given risks of censorship in South Africa. For example, an early series of essays for Sechaba, entitled “The Time Has Come,” outlined his arguments for armed struggle and why Coloured South Africans should support this effort.13 His later essays of the 1960s and early 1970s indicate a continued preoccupation with state racism and Coloured identity, as summarized by two reports he prepared for the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid.14 La Guma and other writer-activists were frequently tasked to explain what “apartheid” was to an international audience—a responsibility of familiarization he had already undertaken in his fiction. However, by the mid-1970s, his attention had shifted to the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and the African continent more generally.15 After 1978, the year he moved to Cuba, an additional turn to the Caribbean can be witnessed, with publications in Tricontinental and discussion of the Cuban experiment and its support for the anti-apartheid struggle appearing in venues like The African Communist.16 La Guma used extended quotations from Fidel Castro in his political journalism to amplify shared ideas. He addressed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, thus contributing to a longstanding critique of Israel by South African activists, continuing to the present.17 In summary, La Guma conjured a political imagination that drew connections between Africa, Asia, and the Americas, whether the subject at hand was the apartheid regime’s conciliatory gestures toward postcolonial African countries, the end of the American war in Vietnam, or intervention in the Caribbean by the Reagan administration. His political writing contributed to a literature of Third Worldism. Yet, against this political backdrop and transnational outlook, La Guma equally stressed the role of culture in politics. His exile writing also includes reports, speeches, and conference papers delivered at events in Beirut, Algeria, East Germany, Tashkent, Luanda, and elsewhere. They regarded, for example, the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, a symposium on Paul Robeson in East Berlin, and La Guma’s growing involvement in the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), ultimately leading to his appointment as secretary general for the organization in 1979—his highest profile position in exile, next to being the ANC’s chief representative for Latin America and the Caribbean while in Havana.18 Of particular interest along the theme of culture is a series of four essays—“Culture and Apartheid in South Africa” (1968), “The Condition of Culture in South Africa”

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(1971), “Culture and Liberation” (1976), and “Has Art Failed South Africa?” (1977)— which describe the deterioration of culture under apartheid and the consequent inseparability of culture from political struggle.19 Drawing from his earlier writing, as well as similar arguments made by Amílcar Cabral, these statements by La Guma must be read on their own terms as delineating a cultural program for the ANC and the SACP: the aim of integrating cultural revolution with political revolution. This position is elaborated further in two speeches for the AAWA in 1979 when its conference was held in Luanda, Angola—its first event in sub-Saharan Africa.20 Indeed, these pieces provide insight into the workings of the AAWA as an organization—its politics, agendas, and ambition—in addition to depicting the institutional dimensions of Afro-Asianism as a Third World platform that defied a conventional continental logic. As summarized in the essay “Is There a South African National Culture?” (1985), which appeared in The African Communist under the pen name “Gala” the year he died, La Guma consistently mounted a case against cultural apartheid in South Africa with the hope that a truly South African literature would be born from the anti-apartheid struggle.21 La Guma’s commitment to cultural revolution is also seen through a variety of small genres. An obituary for his fellow exile Alfred Hutchinson, a tribute to fellow communist writer Pablo Neruda, a speech delivered in New Delhi upon receiving the 1969 Lotus Prize for literature, an editorial on short stories, and a number of book reviews all exhibit his mutual interests in multitalented fashion.22 Why book reviews for The African Communist one might ask? Such minor pieces demonstrate in specific fashion how literature, literary criticism, and culture more generally sustained the deeper humanism of the anti-apartheid struggle and, by extension, liberation movements elsewhere. La Guma embraced the idea of a new South African culture being produced during and, more precisely, through the struggle, not after. By the same stroke, in his reviews and longer critical essays, he promoted the marginalized voices of Black writers, such as Oswald Mtshali, while taking harsher views of internationally known South African writers like playwright Athol Fugard and future Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.23 In “Against Literary Apartheid” (1974), he critiques Gordimer in particular for failing to imagine a convincing Black character in her work, thereby conveying a “separate development” model of South African literature.24 In a similarly provocative vein, he excoriates Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn for mischaracterizing the Soviet Union—an unsurprising position given La Guma’s orthodox communism.25 Indeed, his strident defense of the USSR underlines how he was fallible; recent estimates of those who died in the Gulag prison system approach 2.8 million people.26 Yet, beyond taking a doctrinaire view that clouded his judgment, La Guma aimed to expose the underlying hypocrisy of Western critics for embracing Soviet dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, who were imprisoned for political subversion, while ignoring the similar oppression

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and imprisonment of South African dissidents like himself. Beyond this critical engagement, La Guma did express admiration for other Soviet writers, namely Maxim Gorky. Two pieces in particular, “Literature and Life” (1970) and “What I Learned from Maxim Gorky” (1977), detail the influence that Gorky and socialist realism had on his aesthetic development.27 These vital reflections are suggestive of how Russian and Soviet literature not only impacted La Guma, but other African writers as well—a genealogy of influence in the creation of world literature that has fallen into relative obscurity since the demise of the Soviet Union. La Guma did pursue creative fiction during his time exile: not only the novels In the Fog of the Seasons’ End and Time of the Butcherbird, but also short stories that reflected his travels and his enduring nostalgia for South Africa. His fictional experiments “Come Back to Tashkent” (1970), which is set in Soviet Central Asia and told in the second person, and “Thang’s Bicycle” (1976), which takes place in North Vietnam during an American bombing campaign, both reflect his experiences in these places.28 More significant, they also indicate his attempts to contribute to a postcolonial Afro-Asian literature—an idea he was committed to organizationally and artistically. These two pieces and by extension the contributions of other African and Asian writers to Lotus underscore the important role that short fiction had in the making of postcolonial world literature. Other stories and a collection of radio plays he completed while in London are set in South Africa and recall his earlier work.29 An underlying current of exilic reminiscence animate these pieces. Nostalgia and melancholy, though always tempered by political commitment, can also be discerned in the interviews he gave, beginning in 1966, as well as brief memoirs he composed in essay form.30 Two contributions to The African Communist sharing the same title “Why I Joined the Communist Party” (1971 and 1982) in particular convey these sentiments.31 They provide unique insight into his childhood and upbringing in District Six—a world that, at the time of the publication of these essays, was being destroyed through forced removals after being declared a “whites only” area in 1966. The publication timing of these essays in retrospect appears more than coincidental. Against this backdrop, distant writing equally raises the issue of absence and the labor of exile. Absence is an important keyword and recurring sentiment when thinking about Alex La Guma. As mentioned earlier, his books were banned in South Africa during his lifetime.32 Much of the world that he wrote about—whether the District Six neighborhood of his childhood or an emergent Third World during the exile years of his adulthood—has since vanished. The anti-apartheid struggle itself is over, and many of the values it espoused and that he was stridently committed to—namely, economic justice in concert with political justice—have been marginalized, if not completely abandoned, in post-apartheid South Africa. The Soviet Union, which he visited frequently starting in March 1967 and held in high

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esteem as a political system that had achieved both kinds of justice through socialism, collapsed six years after his death.33 The man himself is absent, too, having passed away in Havana, where his body is still buried. Unlike many of his famed generation who were either released from prison or able to return from exile after years abroad, La Guma is among those who never made it back. He is among those activists whose interred physical remains map a contingent geography of exile and mourning that the apartheid government unduly created. These historical conditions of absence must be understood in turn as a contributing factor for the literary erasure of his exile writing. Much of it was published in non-South African journals, a number of which have ceased publication since the end of the Cold War. The scattered appearance of La Guma’s writing in peripheral or moribund periodicals has retroactively concealed the diversity and extent of this body of work. Reinforcing this situation is La Guma’s outlier status within South African fiction. With the exception of having several novels included in the African Writers Series—the most prestigious in African literature and one of the most significant intellectual projects of the twentieth century—La Guma was not part of a clearly defined literary movement like his peers and friends at the Johannesburg-based Drum magazine, including Lewis Nkosi, Es’kia Mphahlele, Can Themba and Bloke Modisane. From a political standpoint, his communist outlook has, fairly or unfairly, imparted a doctrinaire quality to his work, with critics interpreting his fiction as too ideological. His descriptions of slums, prison life, and police brutality—a South African variation of Gorky’s “proletarian humanism”— are out of fashion with many post-apartheid readers. From a social standpoint, La Guma also stands apart due to his “Coloured” (mixed-race) background. Though of the same generation as the aforementioned Drum writers, a number of whom praised La Guma, his Cape Town origins and Coloured identity have marginalized him vis-à-vis these and other Black writers, despite shared themes of urban life found in their respective work—a kind of literary apartheid that he himself wrote against. La Guma’s fiction has similarly been perceived as too radical compared to the romanticism of Richard Rive, another friend and Coloured writer, whose depiction of District Six in the novel “Buckingham Palace,” District Six (1986) has largely replaced La Guma’s in the popular imagination. As a final reason for neglect, La Guma never wrote or published in Afrikaans, which has provided a committed audience for some Coloured writers, such as the late poet Adam Small. La Guma’s exile writings therefore offer a new means for reconsidering his literary aims, his political concerns, and the progression of his work over the course of a number of difficult, unstable years when personal and political uncertainty was the norm. However, they not only mark the trauma and ambiguity of being a political émigré, but also the search for new forms of home. They stress the ways in which La Guma contributed to the anti-apartheid struggle through artistic means

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by participating in global literary movements—most crucially the AAWA which was founded in 1958 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, funded by the Soviet government, and based for different periods in Colombo, Cairo, Beirut, and Tunis. Indeed, although he carried a British passport, La Guma’s political, national, and racial identities enabled a particular kind of transnational mobility that gave him access to likeminded individuals and conversations—a distinct contrast to conditions in apartheid South Africa. The journalism, literary statements, reviews, and intermittent short stories he wrote track this process of creative connection at the same time as they account for the subjective and affective dimensions of expatriate existence, beyond politics. As such, they also provide a more focused sense of his writing life and the everyday practices that contributed to an emergent Cold War world literature. In La Guma’s case as with many others, being a writer did not consist exclusively of working on books, novels, or fiction per se. It also meant contributing book reviews, sending letters to the editor, reporting on conferences, delivering lectures, answering interview questions, expressing admiration for other authors, and reflecting on one’s personal life, among many activities. Too often the novel and other major literary genres take precedent in critical assessments, generating an unspoken hierarchy of what counts as “literature.” And yet the novel and the fictional mode may be inadequate for fully capturing the scale and complexity of a writer’s career, let alone a nation or a global geography like the Third World. When taken seriously, this kind of written ephemera can constitute a counter-archive apart from state and party materials, casting vital light on the day-to-day assignments between major publications—the passing interests, moments of travel, intellectual cul-desacs, and seeds for future work that, combined, create a mosaic of the obligations, opinions, and ideas that define the writing profession. Such tasks sustained La Guma during the final third of his life. A relationship can be discerned between the small genres he engaged and his international movements. This distant writing represents his constant attempts to maintain his long-term political and artistic commitments, amid the fugitive cosmopolitan lifestyle both forced upon him and which he actively embraced.

Tangential Literatures – Geographies and Genres in Motion Beyond his own life and the broader anti-apartheid movement, how might La Guma’s writing be situated further? What other examples and contexts might be drawn upon to appraise La Guma and to better understand the diverse origins and itineraries of twentieth-century world literature? As cited earlier, exile has been a periodic experience for many African writers. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Bessie Head, and Nuruddin Farah are significant examples from across

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the continent, to name only a few. La Guma’s exile writing also recalls the political work of other activist-intellectuals from South Africa. Books by fellow SACP member and exile Ruth First, the collected speeches of ANC president Oliver Tambo, and the posthumously collected essays of Steve Biko immediately come to mind.34 The Marxist-inflected Pan-Africanism of George Padmore and the retrospective work of Amílcar Cabral, which deeply influenced La Guma’s thinking on culture and revolution, are comparable cases beyond South Africa.35 Taken together, much of this writing reflects a form of “combat literature” (littérature de combat)—a genre of resistance writing drawn from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which itself echoes Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of “engaged literature” (littérature engagée).36 In his final book, Fanon wrote of “a third stage, a combat stage” when “the colonized writer, after having tried to lose himself among the people, with the people, will rouse the people.” “Combat literature, revolutionary literature, [and] national literature” emerge at this time.37 The beginnings of a world literature, which draws from these three, might also be said to emerge at this time. Combat literature as a genre of decolonization presents a means for naming and framing the work of La Guma and other exiles, Fanon himself being a paradigmatic example. Indeed, an argument can be made that non-fiction has been the predominant mode for writing decolonization. It formed a vital part of the re-invention of African literature during the Cold War period. In this sense, the writing of La Guma and others, including Fanon, should not be read reductively as merely intellectual resistance to situations of colonial dominance. Their work reported on social and cultural conditions in addition to political ones. They sought to create new traditions of global humanism. Though South Africa was not yet postcolonial, La Guma, like his peers elsewhere, looked to the future, identifying impending risks of postcolonial power, along with supplying critiques of contemporary inequalities. Attempting to capture a history of the present, their writing fostered solidarity and built new forms of community; it did not solely seek to provoke division and promote conflict. Always aspirational in scope, La Guma and his counterparts sought cultural revolution concurrent with political revolution. In form and content, La Guma’s exile writing resembles the pieces in Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism (originally L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne, 1959) and Toward the African Revolution (1964) in particular, both of which are composite works containing short opinion pieces, sociological case studies, and political journalism that served as drafts for later arguments found in Fanon’s final book.38 La Guma’s non-fiction similarly consisted of draft statements, improvised arguments, and raw reportage that would find its way into his fiction. In this regard, La Guma’s exile writing also represents a kind of “tangential literature”—writing that digresses from expected narratives through experimentation with new forms, foreign settings, incipient ideas, or alternative aesthetics,

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frequently resulting in its later critical marginalization.39 It provides a second way of approaching La Guma’s work in exile. Similar to distant writing, tangential literature abandons routine and can thus be fragmentary and isolated, evincing moments of intellectual and political courage while also undertaking risks of artistic failure and disappearance. But it is not exclusively tied to the condition of exile. Concern is placed instead on radical literary experimentation. La Guma’s political travel memoir, A Soviet Journey (1978), conforms to this definition, as do Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain (1956) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928) to offer two further examples.40 All are works that test new genres and appear on the surface to be tangential to the established concerns of each author, but in fact reflect a deeper level or new stage in their thinking. These exploratory texts—a literature of departure—point in particular to the mutually constitutive intersections between the Soviet Bloc, the Black Atlantic, and the colonial and postcolonial worlds, due to their shared confrontation with the effects of Western aggression. As with Fanon, this impulse toward experimentation by Du Bois, Wright, and La Guma, involving the depiction of situations beyond the countries of their birth, reflected a planetary condition of imperialism and racial capitalism that demanded a politics of global decolonization to which each were stridently committed. Further comparisons can also be drawn between La Guma and Fanon. Both documented liberation struggles, but they also occupied middle-strata positions within their respective political organizations, resulting in diplomatic appointments toward the end of their lives in Cuba and Ghana, respectively. Above all, they shared a generational point of view. Both were born in 1925, and both witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe and its defeat during the Second World War. They understood the necessity of armed struggle—the liberatory potential of violence—to end authoritarian regimes. Fanon gained this knowledge firsthand as a soldier in the Free French Forces. Though he never experienced military service, La Guma wrote about antifascism and the defeat of Nazism by the Soviet Union. By extension, he advocated armed struggle through Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the military wing of the ANC-SACP alliance. In the set of essays for Sechaba cited earlier, entitled “The Time Has Come,” La Guma argued, “The people can no longer stand subservient to tyranny and rule by force and violence,” invoking an anti-colonial spirit akin to Fanon’s. “Violence can only be fought with violence. There is no alternative in South Africa today.” This promotion of an anti-violence violence reflected a shared antifascist orientation—a political like-mindedness drawn from Marxism-Leninism and a generational vantage point of witnessing both the destructiveness and the destruction of global fascism.41 This analogy between La Guma and Fanon can be extended to the cases of South Africa and Algeria more generally—a comparison made by Nelson Mandela and others.42 Similar to the Algerian Revolution, a makeshift division can be drawn

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between those activists who went into exile as part of the ANC’s “external mission”—such as La Guma, First, and Tambo, among many others—and those who remained inside South Africa, whether Mandela, Biko, or Rick Turner, to name only a few cases from different movements and organizations. This split should not be fixed too starkly, since each group faced conditions of censorship, arrest, and imprisonment, with a number falling victim to assassination by the apartheid regime, as in the cases of First, Turner, and Biko. Yet these insider-outsider differences, as in the case of Algeria, provide some explanation for the different intellectual fates and historical legacies of these writers and activists, with those remaining inside South Africa arguably receiving greater popular attention after the end of apartheid—a phenomenon that can be attributed to their presence in the country, whether through return, release, or burial, as well as for the tonal and subjective immediacy of their written work, which had no distance to overcome. In contrast, the exile writing of La Guma points to the wider world of South African activism that emerged during the anti-apartheid years and the artistic, intellectual, and historical loss when this global dimension remains unaccounted for. South African activism during the twentieth century has always had an international orientation, if not always recognized as such. ANC founders John Dube and Pixley ka Isaka Seme studied at Oberlin College and Columbia University, respectively, while Sol Plaatje, another founder, travelled to Great Britain and the United States, where he met Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, after the publication of his landmark book Native Life in South Africa (1914). The longevity of struggle against white minority rule during the segregation and apartheid periods meant this internationalization continued into the post-Second World War period, underscoring how the South African situation challenges conventional chronologies of anti-colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War. The latter, lasting just over forty years until the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, is much shorter than the lengthier, intergenerational South African struggle for democracy. Twentieth-century South African politics underlines the Eurocentrism of many Cold War narratives and how conventional paradigms of the Cold War do not transfer neatly to non-Western contexts more generally. Furthermore, this long history of activism indicates how a wider world of Black Atlantic politics flowed into a politics of communist internationalism and later a tricontinental Third Worldism. These political worlds were not discrete. They informed and shaped one another, being positioned over time against the multifaceted, exploitative measures of a global capitalist system, as the life and writing of La Guma demonstrates. Life came first. James La Guma, Alex’s father, attended the Comintern-sponsored League Against Imperialism meeting held in Brussels, Belgium, in 1927—ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution. He went on to Moscow with Josiah Gumede of the ANC—an early moment of the longstanding partnership between the ANC and

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South African communists—where they met with Soviet Politburo member and Comintern General Secretary Nikolai Bukharin. Together, they developed the Native Republic thesis, which built upon Lenin’s 1920 program on the national and colonial questions that not only argued for colonial self-determination, but Black self-determination as an integral part of this broader plan. The Native Republic thesis, which argued for Black liberation in South Africa, paralleled the Comintern’s Black Belt Nation thesis promoted at the same time, which argued that African Americans should seek self-determination and nationhood in the American South. The upshot is that Black Atlantic and Marxist-Leninist politics intersected at an early stage. Moreover, nationalism and communist internationalism were compatible. The Native Republic thesis defined South Africa as a colony, despite its self-governing status in the British Empire as of 1910, and thus in need of a national democratic revolution prior to socialist revolution. This thesis therefore presaged the later alliance of the SACP-ANC during the 1950s, the alliance itself embodying this two-step process of national liberation first, represented by the ANC, followed by a socialist revolution, to be led by the SACP. The Native Republic thesis still casts a shadow over South African politics almost a century later, with Black nationalism having succeeded but class inequalities remaining unresolved. The thesis also cast a shadow over James’ only son. Alex became involved with the ANC and the Congress Alliance through the South African Coloured People’s Organisation (SACPO) after the CPSA was banned in 1950 under the Suppression of Communism Act and reformed underground as the SACP. The ANC and SACPO afforded a public political cover. Alex’s fiction eventually addressed different aspects of the “colonial question” as drawn from Lenin and foregrounded by the Native Republic thesis. He viewed the racism and class oppression in South Africa as extractive and systemic, requiring revolution. But his exile writing, in particular A Soviet Journey, also addressed the “national question,” a predicament confronted by the Congress Alliance during the 1950s. It was unclear how a new South African nationhood could be achieved given the country’s diversity of ethnic and cultural communities. La Guma believed that socialism as implemented and practiced by the Soviet Union provided an answer. Based on a trip he took throughout the USSR in May, June, and July of 1975 for approximately six weeks upon the invitation of the Soviet Writers’ Union, A Soviet Journey is a travelogue of his journey from the western industrialized cities of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) to Soviet Central Asia, Siberia, and back. However, it is also a depiction of the economic and political journey of the Soviet Union itself—a vision of progress for a future South Africa. The book is consequently an amalgam of travel description and political treatise with the USSR providing a paradigm of self-determination and socialist development. A Soviet Journey is a tangent from La Guma’s acclaimed South Africa-focused fiction, but one that illuminates his political commitments through a different

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mirror. It elucidates a Second Worldism that complements the Third Worldism he also embraced. Published in both Russian and English and complete with publicity photographs in the text, A Soviet Journey is a forthright promotional account. Nonetheless, the book is important for being La Guma’s longest work, fiction or non-fiction. It is La Guma’s most joyful book, enlivened with humor and warmth, in which he finds just about everything to be superior in the USSR. Unlike the oppressive writing conditions he encountered in South Africa, A Soviet Journey demonstrates a newfound freedom while in exile and how the USSR in particular supported the anti-apartheid struggle. It is likewise among his most experimental books—an example of an unguarded late style, as described elsewhere by Edward Said.43 Using a tape recorder for its composition, the book possesses an organic, fluid narrative, with descriptive and temporal juxtapositions throughout the text between Lenin and Marco Polo, the legendary Silk Road and Soviet silk production, ancient civilizations of Central Asia and Soviet modernity. Unlike fellow travelers such as George Padmore and André Gide, who became disillusioned with the USSR, and others like Theodore Dreiser, whose initial critiques transformed into commitment, La Guma composed A Soviet Journey as a culmination of his unwavering lifelong communism.44 Not only was the USSR anti-fascist, but Soviet political conditions resembled those in South Africa. Both were predominantly rural countries with comparatively small industrial bases. The Bolsheviks had confronted the same rural-urban challenges as South African activists, granting a particular affinity between the two countries that La Guma remarked upon. He viewed the Soviet Union in utopian terms, without apology. Beyond this strategic analogy, La Guma followed in the footsteps of preceding Black travelers, such as Langston Hughes and Du Bois, to the USSR and Soviet Central Asia in particular—today, a frequently forgotten contact zone between Europe, East and South Asia, and the Middle East.45 La Guma’s memoir contributes to a deeper history of Black Atlantic engagements with the Soviet experiment, underscoring how south Atlantic activists must be included in this predominantly north Atlantic paradigm and the Black radical tradition more generally.46 La Guma’s exile writing complements and expands upon A Soviet Journey, highlighting a political geography far beyond the South Africa of La Guma’s youth and early adulthood. They capture what I have called his fugitive cosmopolitanism mentioned earlier—an expression that draws upon the notion of “fugitivity” as elaborated by Hortense Spillers, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten, while also underlining the forms of transnational interaction, both political and cultural, that could result from such a condition.47 Indeed, David Attwell has separately drawn from Es’kia Mphahlele to propose the idea of “fugitive modernities,” a form of counter-humanism devised to elude colonial designs.48 Fugitive cosmopolitanism plays a similar role, encapsulating the tensions of freedom and duress, mobility and unsettlement,

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political dissidence and newfound community that La Guma and other émigrés experienced. As an expression, it provides a more active sense of his life than the more conditional passivity imparted by “exile,” enabling a practice of diversion (détour) as described by Édouard Glissant—an exilic exercise of identification and understanding when return may be impossible, when alternative means must be sought in order to grasp conditions of power.49 La Guma’s exile writing consists of such detours. These writings mark attempts by La Guma to situate South Africa and the anti-apartheid struggle within a global landscape of decolonization and nascent postcolonial futures—not only to garner international support, but to sustain revolutionary aims through imaginative means.

Detours of Decolonization – A Conclusion In Apartheid and Beyond (2007), Rita Barnard makes two significant interventions for addressing South African literature after apartheid. The first is that South African literature is an elusive subject to define, given the dramatic political history and demographic diversity of the country. The second is the prominence of space in determining South African literature and culture—from the vitality and confinement of township life in the work of Es’kia Mphahlele, to the middle-class suburbs of Nadine Gordimer, to the rural geographies of J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Olive Schreiner. Drawing on Mphahlele, she calls this thematic emphasis “a commitment to territory.” However, in doing so, she seeks to stress the imaginative limits of this approach. In her view, Mphahlele’s commitment, outlined in his essay “The Tyranny of Place and Aesthetics” (1987), is a product of his experience of exile, which heightened his sense of artistic duty to the South African condition but equally disempowered his ability to portray South African life through concrete details, as he did, for example, in his classic memoir Down Second Avenue (1959).50 La Guma faced the same challenge. Both Mphahlele and Nkosi had praised his ability to render the urban feel of Cape Town in his early fiction.51 However, La Guma did not stop writing. As with A Soviet Journey, a certain freedom of expression is found in his lesser-known non-fiction and short stories written while in exile. His exile writing underscores the autonomy he had, with unsettlement encouraging the creation of new forms of cultural community and new relations of artistic belonging, which in turn complicate simplistic renditions of “exile.” These writings represent tangents and detours from his South African novels and even fiction itself. As such, they uncover a wider set of interests through new subject matter and experiences that shared affinities with the anti-apartheid cause, underscoring a broader landscape of Cold War print cultures that La Guma helped to shape and define. A number of pieces reveal his duties as an editor of the journal Lotus during the 1970s

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and his subsequent executive role in the AAWA starting in the late 1970s until his death in 1985, after which the organization markedly declined.52 They also indicate a reprise of his early vocation as a journalist—he at times referred to himself as a reporter, rather than a novelist or writer of fiction, as one of his cancelled passports indicates. His book reviews, often written under pseudonyms, equally demonstrate that he could be a sharp critic of fellow South African writers and be very generous, too. Taken together, these writings provide a kaleidoscopic view of the life of a writer in exile, demonstrating in palpable fashion how postcolonial literature and criticism must be approached as ongoing practices of commitment, as argued by Ato Quayson, rather than being tied too closely to political events and timelines.53 La Guma’s exile writing ultimately points to a wider world of activism and literary engagement—the multidimensional conversations between Black Atlantic, Second World, Third World, and southern African political communities. His exile oeuvre outlines and analyzes the conjunctures between these realms. But his life also instantiated such encounters. His writings track his movements across time and place, which he could, at times, be surprisingly elusive about. They also underscore the role that institutions and movements like the UN, the Organisation of African Unity, and the Non-Aligned Movement had on his thinking and the importance of international conferences in the making of world literature. They trace the complex itineraries of Afro-Asianism beyond the seminal event of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Indeed, La Guma’s exile writings emphasize how the anti-apartheid struggle cannot be reduced to South Africa alone, as counterintuitive as that might sound. It must be understood as part of a broader conjuncture tied to global efforts against neocolonialism in such places as Palestine, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. A different cultural world linked to the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc also comes to light that contrasts with the Western-oriented, liberal democratic world embraced by acclaimed writers like Soyinka and Achebe. As a communist internationalist, the world was La Guma’s setting, and these writings demonstrate this cultivated sensibility. Anti-apartheid activists looked to the USSR and elsewhere, not just the US and the African American civil rights struggle as so frequently addressed. La Guma accounts for these alternative cultures of decolonization. But more than these political horizons, when we neglect the ephemera of writers, we neglect their working lives—whether as activists, journalists, book critics or writers simply on short-term assignment. Such ephemeral writing provides a sedimented, material sense of the freedom and precarity of lives in exile. It can sketch the contours of thought between political moments, akin to Gramsci’s thinking through the interregnum. Similar to the relative critical neglect of Soviet influence on African writers and other artists elsewhere in the world, La Guma’s exile writing points to anti-colonial liberation struggles, global decolonization, and their roles in the creation of world literature—an alternative epistemology

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shaped by the Cold War.54 World literature should not solely regard questions of translation, genre, and scale, as important as those issues are, but also account for the preceding historical elements and how they informed the intellectual labor, politics, and life situation of the writer.55 These writings by La Guma produced under conditions of revolutionary struggle illustrate the cultural program of the ANC as found in the Freedom Charter (“The Doors of Learning and of Culture Shall be Opened!”), and, in doing so, contributed to a new humanism as aspired to by Fanon, Cabral, and others during the revolutionary period of decolonization. La Guma’s exile writing exemplifies this Cold War humanism and its effects on the emergence of a truly global world literature.

Notes 1

S. Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); H. Macmillan, The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1963-1994 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013); T. Simpson, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle (Johannesburg: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2016).

2

E. W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996).

3

It should be noted that the “Afro-Asian Writers Association” is sometimes spelled with an apostrophe, i.e. “Afro-Asian Writers’ Association.”

4

On print cultures and South African literature, see A. L. Dick, The Hidden History of South Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); A. van der Vlies, ed., Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012). On print cultures in Africa and beyond, see E. Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); P. Kalliney, “Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War,” Modern Language Quarterly 76, 3 (2015): 333–368.

5

C. Abrahams, ed., Memories of Home: The Writings of Alex La Guma (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991); A. La Guma, ed., Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans (New York: International Publishers, 1971); R. Field and A. Odendaal, eds., Liberation Chabalala: The World of Alex La Guma (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1993).

6

A complete list of his fictional works includes: A. La Guma, And a Threefold Cord (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1964); A. La Guma, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1967 [1962]); A. La Guma, The Stone Country (London: Heinemann, 1967); A. La Guma, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End (London: Heinemann, 1972); A. La Guma, Time of the Butcherbird (London: Heinemann, 1979).

7

For an authoritative biography, see R. Field, Alex La Guma: A Literary and Political Biography (London: James Currey, 2010).

8

E. Mphahlele, Afrika My Music: An Autobiography, 1957-1983 (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2013 [1984]), 19.

9

C. J. Lee, Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015), 193–195. See also L. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 28–33.

10

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 14.

238 christopher j. lee

11

F. Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 48.

12

E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 66.

13

A. La Guma, “The Time Has Come,” Sechaba 1, 5 (May 1967): 14–16; A. La Guma, “The Time Has Come: The Coloured People Must Prepare to Bear Arms for Liberation,” Sechaba 1, 6 (June 1967): 15–16; A. La Guma, “The Time Has Come: New Forms of Struggle Face the South African Coloured Community,” Sechaba 1, 3 (March 1967): 14–15; A. La Guma, “The Time Has Come: S. A. Coloured People’s Social and Economic Deterioration,” Sechaba 1, 4 (April 1967): 13–14.

14

A. La Guma, “Apartheid and the Coloured People of South Africa,” Notes and Documents, No. 18/72 (United Nations: Unit on Apartheid, Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, 1972); A. La Guma, “The Immorality Act: South Africa’s Sex Law,” Notes and Documents, No. 21/70 (United Nations: Unit on Apartheid, Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, 1970). See also A. La Guma, “Apartheid Coloured Council Flounders,” Sechaba 9, 1 (1975): 10–12; A. La Guma, “The Coloured Cadets Bill,” Sechaba 1, 10 (1967): 10–11; A. La Guma [as Willem Abram Malgas], “The Coloured People of South Africa,” The African Communist 34, 3rd quarter (1968): 51–59; A. La Guma [as Willem Abram Malgas], “On the Coloured People,” The African Communist 40, 1st quarter (1970): 108–110.

15

A. La Guma, “Africa and the USSR: A Friendly Handshake,” Moscow News 15 (1977); A. La Guma, “Dialogue ‘a gross betrayal.’” Africa Report 17 (1972): 24–25; A. La Guma, “Vietnam: A People’s Victory,” The African Communist 53, 2nd quarter (1973): 29–35; A. La Guma, “Whither South Africa?” The Black Scholar 5, 10 (1974): 30–36.

16

A. La Guma, “Apartheid, Imperialist Monster,” Tricontinental 26 (1971): 43–55; A. La Guma, “Apartheid is Not Just a Regional Problem,” Tricontinental 64 (1979): 85–86; A. La Guma, “Caribbean Against Apartheid,” Sechaba (September 1979): 22–24; A. La Guma, “Caribbean – Nobody’s Backyard,” Dawn 6, 4 (1982): 30–36; Alex La Guma, “Cuba and Africa,” Sechaba (March 1984): 20–23; A. La Guma, “‘This is Our Vanguard, a Vanguard of Communists,’” The African Communist 85, 2nd quarter (1981): 64–75.

17

A. La Guma, “Israel-South Africa: The Unholy Alliance,” Tricontinental 86 (1983): 86–91; A. La Guma, “Israel and South Africa – Where the Vultures Perch,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 52 (1983): 84–87.

18

A. La Guma, “Culture and Revolution,” Sechaba 3, 10 (1969): 23; A. La Guma, “Message to the People and the Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 52 (1983): 148–149; A. La Guma, “Paul Robeson and Africa,” The African Communist 46, 3rd quarter (1971): 113–119; A. La Guma, “Report of the Secretary General to the Seventh General (25th Anniversary) Conference, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, September-October 1983,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 56 (1985): 181–192; A. La Guma, “The Third Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference,” Cultural Events in Africa. 29 (April 1967): 4–5; A. La Guma, “To Alternate Member of the Politbureau, CPSU CC, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, Comrade Sharaf R. Rashidov,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 38-39 (1978-1979): 124; A. La Guma, “To Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the CC CPSU, President of the USSR Supreme Soviet,” Press Bulletin 6. (October 1, 1983); A. La Guma, “Tribute to Indira Gandhi,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 56 (1985), n.p.

19

A. La Guma, “The Condition of Culture in South Africa,” Présence Africaine 80, 4th quarter (1971): 113–122; A. La Guma, “Culture and Apartheid in South Africa,” Tricontinental 8 (1968): 131–136; A. La Guma, “Culture and Liberation,” Sechaba 10, 4th quarter (1976): 50–58; A. La Guma, “Has Art Failed South Africa?” The African Communist 69, 2nd quarter (1977): 78–83.

20

A. La Guma, “Report of the Acting Secretary General,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 42-43 (1979-1980): 72–80; A. La Guma, “Final Speech, Secretary General of the Afro-Asian Writers Association,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 42-43 (1979-1980): 111–112.

21

A. La Guma [as Gala], “Is There a South African National Culture?” The African Communist 100, 1st quarter (1985): 38–43.

liberating world literature: alex la guma in exile 239

22

A. La Guma, “Address by Lotus Award Winner,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4, 10 (1971): 195–197; A. La Guma, “Great Power Conspiracy: Review,” Sechaba 1, 1 (1967): 15; A. La Guma, “I Came Here to Sing: A Tribute to Pablo Neruda,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 22 (1974): 145–147; A. La Guma, “In Memory of Hutch: Alfred Hutchinson (South Africa),” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 17, 3 (1973): 135; A. La Guma, “On Short Stories,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 17, 3 (1973): 132–133; A. La Guma, “South African Freedom Poetry,” The African Communist 61, 2nd quarter (1975): 106–107; A. La Guma, “South African Writing under Apartheid,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 23 (1975): 11–21.

23

A. La Guma, “Hello or Goodbye, Athol Fugard?” The African Communist 57, 2nd quarter (1974): 100–105; A. La Guma [as Gala], “Lust without Passion,” The African Communist 55, 4th quarter (1973): 116–118; A. La Guma [as Gala], “A Poet is Born: Sounds of a Cowhide Drum by Oswald Joseph Mtshali,” The African Communist 48 (1972): 114–117; A. La Guma, “Sounds of a Cowhide Drum by Oswald Joseph Mtshali,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 21 (1974): 180–187.

24

A. La Guma [as Gala], “Against Literary Apartheid,” The African Communist 58, 3rd quarter (1974): 99–107.

25

A. La Guma, “Alexander Solzhenitsyn: ‘Life through a crooked eye,’” The African Communist 56, 1st quarter (1974): 69–79.

26

It should be noted that La Guma could not have known these present-day figures, since they were not fully understood until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the total numbers of those who died during the Soviet period, including the Red Terror, executions, collectivization and so forth, are much higher. See A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor, 2004), 578–584.

27

A. La Guma, “Literature and Life,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4, 4-6 (1970): 237–239; A. La Guma, “What I Learned from Maxim Gorky,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 34, 4 (1977): 164–168.

28

A. La Guma, “Come Back to Tashkent,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4, 4-6 (1970): 208–210; A. La Guma, “Thang’s Bicycle,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 29 (1976): 42–47.

29

See, for example, A. La Guma, “The Exile,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 11 (1972): 68–75; A. La Guma, “Late Edition,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 12 (1972): 152–157; A. La Guma, “The Man in the Tree,” The Literary Review 15, 1 (1971): 19–30.

30

A. La Guma, interviewed by Robert Serumaga, “Alex La Guma, South African Author Recently Settled in London,” Cultural Events in Africa 24 (November 1966): i–ii; A. La Guma, “Answers to Our Questionnaire,” Soviet Literature 11, 356 (1977): 116–117; A. La Guma, “‘My Books Have Gone Back Home,’” World Marxist Review 27, 5 (1984): 71–73; A. La Guma, “‘Walk Among the Multitudes,’” Tricontinental 75 (1981): 39–42.

31

A. La Guma [as Arnold Adams], “Why I Joined the Communist Party,” The African Communist 47, 4th quarter (1971): 57–61; A. La Guma [as Gala], “Why I Joined the Communist Party: Doing Something Useful,” The African Communist 89, 2nd quarter (1982): 49–52.

32

A. van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 119–124.

33

On his first visit to the USSR, see Field, Alex La Guma, 172; C. J. Lee, “Introduction. Anti-Imperial Eyes,” A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition by Alex La Guma, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 26.

34

S. Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings, ed. Aelred Stubbs (Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2002); R. First, 117 Days: An Account of Confinement and Interrogation under the South African 90-Day Detention Law (London: Penguin, 2009 [1965]); O. Tambo, Oliver Tambo Speaks: Preparing for Power, ed. Adelaide Tambo (London: Heinemann, 1987).

35

A. Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, trans. Michael Wolfers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); G. Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa (London: D. Dobson, 1956).

240 christopher j. lee

36

F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1963]); J.-P. Sartre, What is Literature? (London: Routledge, 2001 [1948]).

37

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 159.

38

F. Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965 [1959]); F. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1988 [1964]).

39

For an earlier elaboration of this idea, see Lee, ‘Introduction: Anti-Imperial Eyes’, 44.

40

W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995 [1928]); A. La Guma, A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017 [1978]); R. Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1995 [1956]).

41

On anti-violence violence, see Lee, Frantz Fanon, 156.

42

N. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Back Bay Books,

43

E. W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Vintage, 2006). It

1995), 298. should be noted that, despite his political connections and sympathies, he was undoubtedly watched by state authorities in the USSR and East Germany (GDR). In the case of the USSR, see Lee, “Introduction: Anti-Imperial Eyes,” 29–30. 44

On the disillusioned, see R. Crossman, ed., The God that Failed (New York: Harper, 1949).

45

On Tashkent as a contact zone, see R. Djagalov and M. Salazkina, “Tashkent ’68: A Cinematic Contact Zone,” Slavic Review 75, 2 (2016): 279–298.

46

For a more complete discussion of these issues, see Lee, “Introduction: Anti-Imperial Eyes.”

47

Lee, “Introduction: Anti-Imperial Eyes,” 4, 24; S. Harney and F. Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013); H. J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chapter 7.

48

D. Attwell, Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006), 23–24.

49

É. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville,VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989 [1981]), 14–26.

50

R. Barnard, Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–5, 147–148; E. Mphahlele, “Exile, the Tyranny of Place and the Literary Compromise,” UNISA English Studies 17, 1 (1979): 37–44; E. Mphahlele, “The Tyranny of Place and Aesthetics: The South African Case,” in C. Malan, ed., Race and Literature/Ras en Literatuur (Pinetown: Owen Burgess, 1987), 54.

51

Mphahlele, “The Tyranny of Place and Aesthetics”; L. Nkosi, Home and Exile, and Other Selections (London: Longman, 1983 [1965]), 137–38.

52

On the history of this journal, see H. Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, 3 (2012): 563–83.

53

A. Quayson, “Introduction: Postcolonial Literature in a Changing Historical Frame,” in A. Quayson, ed., The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6.

54

On South African literature and the Cold War, see M. Popescu, South African Literature Beyond the

55

For recent discussions of world literature, see, for example, E. Apter, Against World Literature: On

Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013); P. Cheah, What is a World?: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); A. Mufti, Forget English!:

liberating world literature: alex la guma in exile 241

Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); D. PalumboLiu, et al., eds., Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

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Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Kalliney, Peter. “Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War.” Modern Language Quarterly 76 (2015): 333–368. La Guma, Alex. And a Threefold Cord. Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1964. ———. [interviewed by Robert Serumaga]. “Alex La Guma, South African Author Recently Settled in London.” Cultural Events in Africa. 24 (November 1966): i–ii. ———. “The Coloured Cadets Bill.” Sechaba 1, 10 (1967): 10–11. ———. “Great Power Conspiracy: Review.” Sechaba 1, 1 (1967): 15. ———, The Stone Country. London: Heinemann, 1967. ———. “The Third Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference.” Cultural Events in Africa, 29 (April 1967): 4–5. ———. “The Time Has Come.” Sechaba 1, 5 (May 1967): 14–16. ———. “The Time Has Come: The Coloured People Must Prepare to Bear Arms for Liberation.” Sechaba 1, 6 (June 1967): 15–16. ———. “The Time Has Come: New Forms of Struggle Face the South African Coloured Community.” Sechaba 1, 3 (March 1967): 14–15. ———. “The Time Has Come: S. A. Coloured People’s Social and Economic Deterioration.” Sechaba 1, 4 (April 1967): 13–14. ———, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories. London: Heinemann, 1967 [1962]. ——— [as Willem Abram Malgas]. “The Coloured People of South Africa.” The African Communist 34, 3rd quarter (1968): 51–59. ———. “Culture and Apartheid in South Africa.” Tricontinental 8 (1968): 131–136. ———. “Culture and Revolution.” Sechaba 3, 10 (1969): 23. ———. “Come Back to Tashkent.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4, 4-6 (1970): 208–210. ———. “The Immorality Act: South Africa’s Sex Law.” Notes and Documents, No. 21/70. United Nations: Unit on Apartheid, Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, 1970. ———. “Literature and Life.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4, 4-6 (1970): 237–239. ——— [as Willem Abram Malgas]. “On the Coloured People.” The African Communist 40, 1st quarter (1970): 108–110. ———. “Address by Lotus Award Winner.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 4, 10 (1971): 195–197. ———, ed. Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans. New York: International Publishers, 1971. ———. “Apartheid, Imperialist Monster.” Tricontinental 26 (1971): 43–55. ———. “The Condition of Culture in South Africa.” Présence Africaine 80, 4th quarter (1971): 113–122. ———. “The Man in the Tree.” The Literary Review 15, 1 (1971): 19–30. ———. “Paul Robeson and Africa.” The African Communist 46, 3rd quarter (1971): 113–119. ——— [as Arnold Adams]. “Why I Joined the Communist Party.” The African Communist 47, 4th quarter (1971): 57–61. ———. “Apartheid and the Coloured People of South Africa.” Notes and Documents, No. 18/72. United Nations: Unit on Apartheid, Department of Political and Security Council Affairs, 1972. ———. “Dialogue ‘a gross betrayal.’” Africa Report 17 (1972): 24–25. ———. “The Exile.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 11 (1972): 68–75. ———, In the Fog of the Seasons’ End. London: Heinemann, 1972. ——— “Late Edition.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 12 (1972): 152–157. ——— [as Gala]. “A Poet is Born: Sounds of a Cowhide Drum by Oswald Joseph Mtshali.” The African Communist 48 (1972): 114–117.

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——— [as Gala]. “Is There a South African National Culture?” The African Communist 100, 1st quarter (1985): 38–43. ———. “Report of the Secretary General to the Seventh General (25th Anniversary) Conference, Tashkent, Uzbekistan, September-October 1983.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 56 (1985): 181–192. ———. “Tribute to Indira Gandhi.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 56 (1985) n.p. ———. A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition, edited by Christopher J. Lee. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017 [1978]. Lee, Christopher J. Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015. ———. “Introduction: Anti-Imperial Eyes.” In A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition by Alex La Guma, edited by Christopher J. Lee, 1–60. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. Macmillan, Hugh. The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia, 1963-1994. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013. Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995. Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. London: Verso, 2013. Mphahlele, Es’kia. “Exile, the Tyranny of Place and the Literary Compromise.” UNISA English Studies 17, 1 (1979): 37–44. ———. Afrika My Music: An Autobiography, 1957-1983. Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2013 [1984]. ———. “The Tyranny of Place and Aesthetics: The South African Case.” In Race and Literature/Ras en Literatuur, edited by Charles Malan, 48–59. Pinetown: Owen Burgess, 1987. Mufti, Aamir. Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nkosi, Lewis. Home and Exile, and Other Selections. London: Longman, 1983 [1965]. Padmore, George. Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa. London: D. Dobson, 1956. Palumbo-Liu, David, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi, eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Popescu, Monica. South African Literature Beyond the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Quayson, Ato. “Introduction: Postcolonial Literature in a Changing Historical Frame.” In The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, vol. 1, edited by Ato Quayson, 1–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. ———. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage, 1996. ———. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Vintage, 2006. Sartre, Jean-Paul. What is Literature? London: Routledge, 2001 [1948]. Simpson, Thula. Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle. Johannesburg: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2016. Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago, MI: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Tambo, Oliver. Oliver Tambo Speaks: Preparing for Power, edited by Adelaide Tambo. London: Heinemann, 1987. van der Vlies, Andrew. South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. ———, ed. Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995 [1956].

Afterword B. Venkat Mani

Abstract What are the benefits of engaging with “World/Global History” and “World Literature,” now, at beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, and for future readers of this volume? Which human values and institutions are at stake, that necessitate critical interventions in history and literature—two of the most important arts that document the shared and the unshared of our collective humanity—on the worldly stage, a global scale? This afterword addresses these questions through an analysis of Friedrich von Schiller’s inaugural lecture (1789) at the University of Jena, “The Nature and Value of Universal History.” The work of a philosopher of “universal history,” a term Schiller interchangeably uses with “world history,” is to recognize and draw the interconnections between fragments. A century and a half after Schiller’s inaugural lecture, without any references to him, in another part of the world, a lawyer, politician, and one of the main leaders of an important anti-colonial movement revisited the question of world history. In Glimpses of World History, first written as a series of letters between October 1930 and August 1933 to his daughter Indira while being imprisoned by the British government, Jawaharlal Nehru presents an entirely different account of the nature and value world history

Keywords: Friedrich von Schiller; Universal History; Jawaharlal Nehru; Glimpses of World History

Entering a conversation after everyone else has spoken is a daunting task. The predicament to add another layer of richness and complexity to the subject becomes even more challenging when the conversation is as ambitious as the one undertaken in this volume, led by not one, but two historians of note: Patrick Manning and Neilesh Bose. Not to mention the stunning gallery of scholars who have presented multi-perspectival examinations of several keywords that comprise the subtitle of the volume: literature, comparison, and approaches to globalization. Manning’s short and succinct “Foreword” provides an excellent overview of multiple conceptualizations of “World” and “World History” that the volume offers. Bose’s conceptually rich and argumentatively compelling introductory essay locates the terms “World Literature,” “World History,” and “Global History,” in a longer history of ideas, illuminating differences, but also intersections between lines of inquiry across Euro-American and Indian scholarly landscapes, historically and in the contemporary period.

246 b. venkat mani

Instead of rehearsing or presenting a neatly packaged summary of all the scholarly positions, I want to use Bose’s kind invitation to write the “Afterward” to signal not the end, but the continuation of this timely conversation by raising two questions: What are the benefits of engaging with “World/Global History” and “World Literature,” now, at beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, and for future readers of this volume? Which human values and institutions are at stake, that necessitate critical interventions in history and literature—two of the most important arts that document the shared and the unshared of our collective humanity—on the worldly stage, a global scale? Indeed I am paraphrasing a historical query: “Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?”1 This question, which in literal translation would appear as “what is called, and to what end does one study universal history?” was raised by Friedrich von Schiller in his inaugural lecture (1789) at the University of Jena. The title of the English translation of this lecture, “The Nature and Value of Universal History”2 takes away the edgy curiosity that characterizes Schiller’s essay. Schiller begins his lecture with a long diatribe on the position of a “Brotgelehrte”3 or “bread-and-butter scholar,” who “puts his intellectual ability to work only in order to improve his material position to gratify his petty craving for recognition.”4 “Wo der Brotgelehrte trennt, vereinigt der philosophische Geist”5—“where the bread-and-butter scholar puts asunder, the philosopher joins together”6—claims Schiller. The work of a philosopher of “universal history,” a term Schiller interchangeably uses with “world history,” is to recognize and draw the interconnections between fragments. The possibility of drawing those interconnections, as Schiller sees toward the end of the eighteenth century, is initiated and facilitated by European conquests and colonization of the non-West: “As he [the European man] has borne Europe to the West Indies and the South Seas, so he has resurrected Asia in Europe.”7 The very long sketch of human evolution from so-called savagery to civilization that Schiller provides in his essay is predictably Eurocentric and racist, for he sees in the “savage” tribes of Africa “the picture of our own childhood.”8 Europe’s maturity, in contrast, is celebrated for its accomplishments in the arts, its freedom, its advanced political structures, and through peace guaranteed by various treaties.9 So the task of a “Universal world-history,” Schiller proposes, is to answer “[w]hat conditions of life did man traverse in ascending from…the unsociable life of the cave dweller to the life of the thinker, of the civilized man of the world?”10 The key function of a philosophically organized narrative of world history would then be to bring harmony to the various incongruous fragments of world history. World history, according to Schiller, acquires its scientific character through a philosophical synthesis, which aids in “joining these fragments together by artificial links, [and] transforms the aggregate into a system, a rationally coherent whole.”11

afterword 247

A century and a half after Schiller’s inaugural lecture, without any references to him, in another part of the world, a lawyer, politician, and one of the main leaders of an important anti-colonial movement revisited the question of world history. In Glimpses of World History, first written as a series of letters between October 1930 and August 1933 to his daughter Indira while being imprisoned by the British government, Jawaharlal Nehru presents an entirely different account of the nature and value world history. Akin to Schiller, Nehru’s purpose is also pedagogical, for he longs to participate in the education of his daughter from the prison. His account of history is also evolutionary: “a study of history should teach us how the world has slowly but surely progressed. […] Man’s growth from barbarism to civilization is a supposed to be a theme of history.”12 The significance of looking at the world and its events in an interconnected way remains central to Nehru’s idea of world history as well: “I dislike…learning the history of just one country, and that, too, very often through learning by heart some dates and a few facts. But history is one connected whole, and you cannot understand even the history of any one country if you do not know what has happened in other parts of the world. I hope that you will not learn history in this narrow way.”13 Nonetheless, given his contrary positions vis-à-vis the impact of European colonialism, Nehru is sharply critical of European imperial powers’ civilizing mission in Asia: “Today Europe is strong and powerful, and its people consider themselves the most civilized and cultured in the world. They look down upon Asia and her peoples and come and grab everything they can from the countries of Asia.”14 Writing in the interwar period, Nehru is also highly skeptical of Europe’s role in maintaining world peace in the twentieth century: “Fear grips the world, and Europe, lashed by aggressive and triumphant Nazism and fascism, deteriorates rapidly and takes the road to barbarism.”15 These statements cannot be dis-embedded from the historical moments in which they were written. Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution is Schiller, at once the playwright of bourgeois tragedies such as Kabale und Liebe (1784) and historical plays such as Don Carlos (1787), whose commentary on aesthetic education, Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen (1795) remains a benchmark text in thinking through the value of liberal arts in human formation and education (Bildung) even today. And yet, Schiller’s notions on the philosophy of world history remain entrenched in the racist, European supremacist vision of the world that justifies colonialism, and which allows the purportedly adult, mature Europe to construct through its Orientalist knowledge production the image of a wild and chaotic “childhood” of human civilization in Africa and Asia. The ambivalence of Enlightenment values—liberty, equality, and fraternity for some but not for others—is unquestionably a part of Schiller’s own philosophical, scientific framework that demands synthesis of world historical fragments.

248 b. venkat mani

Nehru, writing during the years leading to the Second World War and the Holocaust, one of the darkest periods of the twentieth century, is remarkably direct in undoing the binary of an infant non-Europe contra a mature Europe. Without claiming a philosophical method, Nehru is accurately diagnosing the intellectual exhaustion of European scientific progress and territorial expansion, then visible through rise of dictatorial ideologies and yet another destructive war on the horizon. Contrary to Schiller, Nehru’s pedagogical plan, the aesthetic and political/historical education of a younger generation of Indians at the dawn of its independence from two hundred years of colonial rule, is informed by the equality of human race and a liberty for all for the formation of a new fraternity of decolonized nations. In an uncanny way, Nehru succeeds in imagining an India after World History, as the title of this volume promises. Albeit as must be clear by now, after the Schillerian world history that dominated European thought for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and still informs plenty of nationalist and racial supremacies. These two moments serve as excellent reference points to think through the two questions I raised about the significance of world history in our own moment of geo-political conflicts and ideological contestations. I write these lines two years after SARS Covid 19 was declared a global pandemic, taking billions of lives across the world, and in the immediate shadow of Putin’s imperial war on Ukraine which has already created two million refugees.16 The project of Europe, which after the iconic fall of the Berlin wall was viewed through the transnational European Union has been shaken by Brexit.17 Exclusionary nationalisms in Hungary, Romania, and even in Germany through the rise of Alternative für Deutschland, an extreme right wing political party have been witnessed by all, especially since the arrival of Syrian refugees in Europe in 2015.18 Postcolonial societies have played the same hand, Nehru’s imagination of India as a place of democratic egalitarianism has been eclipsed by Hindu right wing government in India, which remains popular19 despite gross mismanagement of healthcare during the pandemic and continues to feel empowered to relegate rights of Muslims and other religious minorities. NATO forces’ US-led war on Afghanistan has been lost to the Taliban, creating yet another global refugee crisis.20 Following the worldwide resonance of Black Lives Matter movement in the US against White supremacy and police brutality in the summer of 2020 and the election of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth president, the bloody insurrection at US Capitol building on January 6, 2021 is already being framed through alternative truths which propose that America be made great again and taken back from all Native, Brown, and Black Americans. As John Grinspan and Peter Manseau, curators at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History poignantly write, “Judging…isn’t history’s strong suit. Notions of justice change radically over time.”21

afterword 249

These are just a few examples, but they suffice to illustrate that globally, democratic structures intended to assure egalitarianism, human rights, and human dignity are at stake. National sovereignty has been compromised through exclusionary nationalisms which openly defy rights of minorities within, and rights of refugees outside of the nation. Militarization of societies through information wars on social media and manipulation of public memory to favor majoritarian supremacies is not the cause, but the aftereffect of endangerment of international cooperation and diplomacy to resolve disputes. National exceptionalism and isolationalism have acquired prominence, even as economic interdependence has increased. Economic globalization and transfer of goods and services continues at a pace unprecedented in world history entering a new transitory phase, calling upon us to leave behind the “world is flat” model that informed our understanding in the early 2000s.22 In addition, mass migration of human beings—willful or forced—continues at an unforeseen pace. 2016 was a record year in terms of number of migrants, i.e., people living in a place other than their place of birth living worldwide.23 Over 84 million, or roughly one percent of the entire world’s population is forcibly displaced.24 Through social media and technological advances, the older definitions of diaspora, implying loss and yearning for the homeland left behind, are also subject to reconsideration. Migrants and refugees continue to diversify societies in the global north and south, which essentially also means that events that happen in one part of the world cannot remain contained within the political boundaries of the nation-state. Just like the Coronavirus, violence that occurs in one nation or one region captures the imagination of worldwide migrants and diasporas, impacting histories, memories, and their narration through storytelling. When individual or familial pasts are swept by currents of world historical forces, no national community can pretend to remain disconnected. It is precisely in this hyperlinked world that the need for consideration of world literature and world history becomes even more essential. As I wrote in Recoding World Literature (2017), world literature is historically conditioned, culturally determined, and political charged. The circulation of world literature in any society is the function of Bibliomigrancy—the physical and virtual migration of books—and a society’s pact with books. Tracing the conceptual career of the term from European colonialism, which made Goethe’s pronouncement of the era of world literature possible in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, to Marx and Engels’ engagement with World Literature in the worldwide traffic of ideas, to the unification of Germany, the two World Wars, the division of Germany into GDR and FRG and the unification following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the cultural politics of the European Union, the connections between the political, the material, and the intellectual were at the heart of my conceptualization of world literature as a philosophical ideal, a pedagogical strategy, and a mode of affiliation.

250 b. venkat mani

Moments of colonialism, nation-building, nationalist manipulation of the term World Literature during the Nazi regime, and the ideologically bifurcated moments of conceptualizations of the term in east and west Germany were central to the book. In other words, Bibliomigrancy was a way to imagine migration at the heart of the world literary enterprise, albeit considering the challenges to the spirit of cosmopolitanism and fellowship through readership in the public sphere, away from “pendantic arrogance,” to use Goethe’s term, to subject the term to scrutiny. My own definition of the term world literature was located in my migrant past and present, within the larger political text of the world which I happened to read from Germany, India, and the US. As many contributors of this volume have insinuated, which Bose also iterates compellingly in his introduction, there are multiple ways of approaching world literature and world history, of creating narratives of significance in literature, comparison, and globalization. As a scholar interested in social lives of books and investigations of world literature in the larger public sphere outside of the US graduate seminar room or academic conference, I contend that aesthetic education through world literature and world history today must take into account the political charge that the terms carry, and through which they define debates on human equality and dignity in the current times, and for the future. The question today is not whether we engage in studies of literatures or histories of particular nations in national or world literary/ historical framework, but how we do it, and for which larger public good. As the author of the Afterword, of a volume entitled India after World History, let me end by drawing the readers’ attention to the word “after.” As a preposition, the word is a temporal and a spatial marker. It designates the time following an event or period of time, or a place behind, in the rear of something. When used as a conjunction the word may signify subsequence, whereas as an adverb it marks a later or future time, as in afterwards. So, the title may imply an India following the idea of world history, India marking its space within the project of world history, or India signifying a later time, a future of world history and world literature. May that literature and history be written in a vocabulary that does away with exceptionalism and isolationalism, and be read to throw away shackles of narrow nationalism, majoritarian supremacy, and pedantic arrogance.

Notes 1

F. von Schiller, “Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? Eine akademische Antrittsrede,” in J. Müller, ed., Schillers Werke: in fünf Bänden, vol. 3 (Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1981), 273–295.

afterword 251

2

Friedrich von Schiller, “The Nature and Value of Universal History: An Inaugural Lecture [1789],” History and Theory 11, 3 (1972): 321–34.

3

Schiller, “Universalgeschichte.” 276.

4

Schiller, “The Nature and Value of Universal History.” 322.

5

Schiller, “Universalgeschichte.” 277.

6

Schiller, “The Nature and Value of Universal History.” 324.

7

Schiller. 326.

8

Schiller. 325.

9

Schiller. 326–327.

10

Schiller. 328.

11

Schiller. 331.

12

J. Nehru, Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People. With 50 Maps by J. F. Horrabin. (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1962). 6.

13

Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 5.

14

Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 10.

15

Nehru, Glimpses of World History, 990.

16

A. Timsit, T. Bella, M. Bearak, Z. Murphy and D. Rosenzweig-Ziff, “In Historic Crisis, 2 Million People Have Fled Ukraine since the Start of Russian Invasion, U.N. Says,” Washington Post, March 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/ukraine-refugees-2-million-russia/.

17

G. Singh, “Post-Brexit, the Idea of European Union Faces Another Challenge – This Time from Belarus and Poland,” Firstpost, November 27, 2021, https://www.firstpost.com/world/post-brexitthe-idea-of-european-union-faces-another-challenge-this-time-from-belarus-and-poland-10169121. html.

18

R. Alkousa, “Germany’s Far-Right AfD Calls for Repatriation of Syrian Refugees,” Reuters, November 9, 2017, sec. everythingNews, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-ger�many-syria-idUSKBN1D92QI.

19

N. Sharma, “Indian Voters Reward Modi’s BJP despite Covid Mishandling and a Haphazard Lockdown,” Quartz, accessed March 13, 2022, https://qz.com/india/2140203/modis-bharatiya-jana� ta-party-bjp-wins-uttar-pradesh-election/.

20

B. V. Mani, “Empires Slay, Publics Pay: The Global Refugee Crisis Unfolding in Afghanistan,” Hindustan Times, August 22, 2021, https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/empires-slay-pub� lics-pay-the-global-refugee-crisis-unfolding-in-afghanistan-101629631940164.html.

21

J. Grinspan and P. Manseau, “It’s 2086. This Is What American History Could Look Like,” The New York Times, January 6, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/opinion/jan-6-shaman-pastfuture.html.

22

S. Lund, J. Manyika, J. Woetzel, J. Bughin, and M. Krishnan, “Globalization in Transition: The Future of Trade and Global Value Chains | McKinsey,” accessed March 13, 2022, https://www.mckinsey. com/featured-insights/innovation-and-growth/globalization-in-transition-the-future-of-trade-andvalue-chains.

23

United Nations, “The Number of International Migrants Reaches 272 Million, Continuing an Upward Trend in All World Regions, Says UN | UN DESA | United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs,” accessed March 13, 2022, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/ population/international-migrant-stock-2019.html.

24

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Figures at a Glance,” UNHCR, accessed March 13, 2022, https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html.

252 b. venkat mani

Works Cited Alkousa, Riham. “Germany’s Far-Right AfD Calls for Repatriation of Syrian Refugees.” Reuters, November 9, 2017, sec. everythingNews. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-ger�many-syria-idUSKBN1D92QI. Grinspan, John, and Peter Manseau. “It’s 2086. This Is What American History Could Look Like.” The New York Times, January 6, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/06/opinion/jan-6-shamanpast-future.html. Lund, Susan, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, Jacques Bughin, and Mekala Krishnan. “Globalization in Transition: The Future of Trade and Global Value Chains | McKinsey.” Accessed March 13, 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/innovation-and-growth/globalization-in-transitionthe-future-of-trade-and-value-chains. Mani, B. Venkat. “Empires Slay, Publics Pay: The Global Refugee Crisis Unfolding in Afghanistan.” Hindustan Times, August 22, 2021. https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/empires-slay-pub� lics-pay-the-global-refugee-crisis-unfolding-in-afghanistan-101629631940164.html. Nehru, Jawaharlal. Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People. With 50 Maps by J. F. Horrabin. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1962. Schiller, Friedrich von. “The Nature and Value of Universal History: An Inaugural Lecture [1789].” History and Theory 11, 3 (1972): 321–34. ———. “Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? Eine akademische Antrittsrede.” In Schillers Werke: in fünf Bänden, edited by Joachim Müller, 3: 273–95. Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker. Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1981. Sharma, Niharika. “Indian Voters Reward Modi’s BJP despite Covid Mishandling and a Haphazard Lockdown.” Quartz, March 10, 2022. https://qz.com/india/2140203/modis-bharatiya-janata-partybjp-wins-uttar-pradesh-election/. Singh, Gurjit. “Post-Brexit, the Idea of European Union Faces Another Challenge – This Time from Belarus and Poland.” Firstpost, November 27, 2021. https://www.firstpost.com/world/ post-brexit-the-idea-of-european-union-faces-another-challenge-this-time-from-belarus-andpoland-10169121.html. Timsit, Annabelle, Timothy Bella, Max Bearak, Zoeann Murphy and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff. “In Historic Crisis, 2 Million People Have Fled Ukraine since the Start of Russian Invasion, U.N. Says.” Washington Post, March 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/ukraine-ref� ugees-2-million-russia/. United Nations, “The Number of International Migrants Reaches 272 Million, Continuing an Upward Trend in All World Regions, Says UN | UN DESA | United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs,” accessed March 13, 2022, https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/popula� tion/international-migrant-stock-2019.html. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Figures at a Glance.” UNHCR. Accessed March 13, 2022. https://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html.

About the Authors

Jonathan Arac is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh. Founding Director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Humanities Center and editor of the literary journal boundary 2, Arac’s specialties include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and British literature, the novel, and cultural studies. He has published numerous books and edited volumes on these topics, including Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (Fordham, 2010). Alexander Beecroft is Jessie Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of Foreign Languages at the University of South Carolina. His major areas of research interest lie in current debates about world literature with a grounding in the literatures of Ancient Greece and Rome and of pre-Tang Chinese literature (i.e. before AD 600). His most recent book is An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Verso, 2015). Neilesh Bose is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria. With a focus on modern South Asian history, the history of modern migrations, and global history, his most recent book is the edited volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labor, Law, and Wayward Lives (Bloomsbury, 2020). Nandini Dhar is Associate Professor of Humanities at O. P. Jindal Global University. A comparatist specializing in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary cultures, she has published on writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Dionne Brand and Amitav Ghosh, focusing on such issues as memory, trauma, and the emergence of a twenty-first-century critical retrospective realism in postcolonial novels. She is also a poet and the author of a full-length collection titled Historians of Redundant Moments: A Novel in Verse (Agape Editions, 2016). J. Daniel Elam is Assistant Professor of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong. Research areas feature anticolonial thought in South Asia and Africa, anti-racist and anti-casteist political activism, comparative world literature, postcolonial theory, and gay history. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham, 2020).

254 about the authors

Jos Gommans is Chair of Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. His areas of specialization include early modern Indian history, early modern Islamic empires, South Asian Islam, military history, and the history of globalization. An author of numerous books and articles on these subjects, his most recent book is The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550 (Rijksmuseum and Vantilt: 2018). Kedar Kulkarni is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at FLAME University. His interests feature literature in early modern and colonial India, including orally-recited poetry to playwright centered drama in Marathi. His first book is World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890 (Bloomsbury, 2022). Radha Kumar is Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University. She is a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, with a focus on Tamil-speaking south India, caste, crime, and police in colonial contexts. Her first book is Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900-1975 (Cornell, 2021). Christopher Lee is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College. He specializes in African history (especially southern Africa), Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asianism, and Black political thought. An author or editor of numerous books and edited volumes on these subjects, his most recent book is the edited collection Alex La Guma, Culture and Liberation: Exile Writings, 1966-1985 (Seagull, 2021). Patrick Manning is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh. He served as founding director of the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh from 2008 to 2015. Author of several single-authored monographs and edited volumes in African history, world history, and migrations history, his most recent book is A History of Humanity: The Evolution of the Human System (Cambridge, 2020). B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He researches in German, Turkish, and Hindi-Urdu language materials as a comparatist. His interests include world literature in translation, migration in the German and European context, book and digital cultural histories, cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. His books include Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Iowa, 2007) and Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (Fordham, 2017).

Index

aesthetics, 93, 97, 99, 103, 105, 117, 138, 183, 208, 222, 230, 235 Afro-Asianism, 219, 226, 236 Akbar, Abu’l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad, 10, 40, 174, 178, 183-84, 187, 190, 196

classics, 59-62, 64-65, 67-68, 80-81, 87, 96-97, 99, 104, 171 colonialism, 9, 12, 25, 42, 60, 86, 94, 98, 107-8, 123, 210, 247, 249-50 communism, 208, 219-21, 225-28, 232-33, 236

Ambedkar, B.R., 201, 204, 206

Communist Manifesto, 18, 75, 117

Anjaria, Ulka, 115-16, 119-21, 123, 126, 143

Criminal Tribes Act, 153, 157

anti-apartheid movement, 40, 219-23, 225-29,

Damrosch, David, 8, 18-21, 27, 40, 45, 50, 64,

232, 234-36

96, 208

Appadurai, Arjun, 12, 36-38

Deeti, 34, 40, 120, 126, 128-32, 134-43

Arabic, 59-63, 68, 85, 102, 176-77, 183

decolonization, 18, 24-25, 33, 204, 219-20, 223,

Arac, Jonathan, 9, 14, 39, 75 Asia, 12, 22, 25, 35-36, 49, 59-60, 63, 70, 84, 163, 172, 190, 225, 227, 236, 246-47 Asian studies, 11, 35 Atlantic region, 8-9, 11, 13, 34-35, 39-40, 83, 117 Black Atlantic, 33, 231-34, 236 Auerbach, Erich, 9, 14, 18, 87, 205, 207, 209-11 anticolonialism, 12, 204, 210, 219, 232

230-32, 235-37 development, 17-19, 21, 23, 26-27, 37-38, 44, 58, 63, 68-69, 71, 79, 82, 85-86, 115-16, 122, 124, 144, 173, 175, 177, 179, 192, 221-22, 226-27, 233 empire, 9-10, 14, 24-25, 32-33, 35, 40-43, 48, 68-70, 81, 85, 170-71, 184, 186, 188, 190, 204, 233

Bayly, C.A., 45, 75, 79-81

empiricism, 17, 172, 175, 211

Bell, Duncan, 10, 14, 33

England, 10, 31, 40, 77, 79, 129, 152, 169, 171-72,

Bengali, 30, 95, 133, 135

178, 182-83, 185-86, 190

Bhagavad Gita, 12, 201-2

Eurasia, 34, 40, 57, 67

Calcutta (Kolkata), 11, 34

Europe, 9-10, 18, 23, 26-28, 32, 35, 38-39, 47,

capitalism, 9, 12, 40, 115-18, 121, 123, 127, 131-32, 138, 141, 143, 172 capitalist realism, 11, 40, 115, 132-35, 142-43 racial capitalism, 42, 231

58-63, 67-70, 80, 85, 87, 93, 95, 97-99, 102, 106, 117, 151, 159, 163, 166, 170-71, 173, 175-77, 181, 183, 185-86, 188, 191-93, 203, 209-10, 231, 234, 246-49

Casanova, Pascale, 8, 18, 27, 63, 70, 209

Fairfax, Nathaniel, 10, 32

caste, 98, 126-27, 135, 141, 151-57, 159-64, 166,

Fanon, Frantz, 201, 207, 210-11, 230-31, 237

206 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 13, 43 characterization (in novels), 11-12, 34-35, 40, 125-26, 132, 135, 143

France, 9, 22, 24-25, 34, 58, 63-64, 78-80, 82, 208, 210, 212, 221, 231, 247 futurism, 206 Gandhi, M.K., 12, 202-4, 210-12

Chinese, 18, 26, 34-35, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69-71, 208

Ganges River, 169-70, 188

Chiplunkar, Vishnushastri, 9, 93, 98-103, 107-8,

gender, 7, 12, 21, 115, 119, 126-27, 129, 135-43,

110 class, 78, 81, 118-20, 124-27, 129, 131-33, 135-39, 141-43, 151-52, 160, 162-63, 221, 233, 235

151-52, 163 geomancy, 173, 181 Getachew, Adom, 12, 33

256 index

Ghosh, Amitav, 11-12, 34-35, 41, 115, 119, 121-23, 130-31, 133-35, 141-44 global history, 10, 17-19, 22-27, 30, 34-35, 37,

and Marathi, 9, 13, 40, 93-101, 106, 109-10 and the Mediterranean, 69 and modernization, 129, 131

39-41, 43, 45, 57, 67, 70, 81, 97, 107, 117,

and Moretti, Franco, 80

130, 169-70, 188, 245-46

Mughal, 169, 171, 178, 183

globalization, 7-8, 10, 13, 17, 19, 22-24, 29, 36-39,

and Nadar, 153-62, 165-66

49n81, 70, 76, 117-18, 170, 178, 180, 245,

and nationalism, 126

249-50

and Nehru, Jawaharlal, 248

global intellectual history, 10, 24, 32-33, 37, 169, 201

northern, 31 and novels, 116, 119, 122-23

global literary history, 39, 57, 60, 62-63, 66-67

place, 25, 36

Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 18, 20, 28, 62-64,

and plantations, 127

208-10, 249-50

premodern, 29, 83, 95

Goodman, Nelson, 10, 14, 32-33

realisms, 117, 122-23

Great Divergence, 172

and religion, 180

Green, Nile, 12, 39, 49

and Sanskrit, 85

Hartman, Saidiya, 26

and Sivakasi, 153-63

Hermeticism, 173, 175-76

South, 84, 151-52

Hindi, 25, 31, 95, 123-24

and tea, 75

Hobsbawm, Eric, 33, 75, 79-81 humanities, 7-9, 11, 65, 173, 208 Ibis, 7-8, 11-13, 17-18, 34, 36, 70, 115-16, 128, 134-35, 138, 141

western, 93-94, 97 Islam, 26, 38, 49, 60, 69, 170-73, 175-77, 180-81, 183, 186, 188 Kondo, Dorinne, 10, 33

imperial history, 22, 24-25

La Guma, Alex, 12, 219-37, 239

indenture (labor), 12-13, 34-35, 40, 115, 117-18,

lettrism, 173, 181

120, 122, 124, 126-28, 131-33, 135-36, 138,

lex animata, 185

140-43

literary geography, 57

India

literary realism, 13, 124

and Adivasis, 134

Madras Presidency, 132-34, 137

and Bhakti traditions, 100

Maravar, 153-55, 157-63, 166

and capitalism, 121-23, 132, 141

Mani, B. Venkat, 8, 18, 29, 47, 208, 245

and class, 120

masque, 184, 187

colonial, 24, 26, 35, 40, 94, 98, 104, 124-25,

mathematics, 181, 183

151-52, 164

Mauritius, 11, 34, 122, 128, 135

diaspora, 8, 124, 249

Mazlish, Bruce, 10, 19

east, 117, 133

meeting points, 7-8, 13, 19

and the East India Company, 27, 43

Menon, Dilip, 8, 27, 37-38

Emperor of, 161

Mimesis, 9, 86-87, 211

and the Enlightenment, 128

modernity, 10, 14, 23-24, 27, 29-30, 37, 40-41, 46,

and Europe, 105, 172-73, 178, 186, 250 Government of, 159, 248

60-61, 67, 83, 105, 107, 118, 121, 125, 127-29, 131, 138, 171-73, 177, 188, 203, 234

history, 7-8, 13, 248, 250

Moretti, Franco, 8, 18-19, 27, 63, 75, 77, 79, 224

and indentured labor, 34-35, 116, 122

Mughal Empire, 10, 23, 40, 169-71, 173, 177-78,

Indian Ocean, 8, 12, 34-35, 38-39, 49, 144 and the Kāvyaprakāśa, 103 and Konar, 162 and Maharashtra, 96, 100

180-81, 183-84, 186-87, 190, 192-95 nationalism, 13, 21, 24, 30-31, 39, 43, 57, 60, 76, 88, 97, 125-27, 172, 232-33, 248-50 neocolonialism, 220, 236

index 257

neoliberalism, 10, 14, 33, 70, 120, 132, 139, 142-43 Neoplatonism, 10, 169-72, 175-80, 184-86, 188, 191, 193 neostocisim, 186 nonviolence, 202 Orientalism, 28, 84, 108, 172, 175-76, 191 periodization, 13, 28, 57, 67-68, 71 philosophy, 10, 32-33, 77, 103, 110, 169, 171, 173, 176, 178-80, 188, 204, 210, 245-47

Romanticism, 93-94, 97, 99-101, 107, 109-10, 228 sāhitya, 95-97, 102-3, 106-7 Said, Edward, 79, 84, 205, 211, 220, 234 Schiller, Friedrich, 245-48, 250 Sanskrit, 9, 13, 23, 29-31, 59, 63, 68, 83-87, 93, 95-100, 102-8, 111, 177, 202-3 Sea of Poppies, 11-12, 34, 40, 77, 115-27, 131-38, 141-44 secularization, 172 Sharma, Ramayatar, 8, 25-26, 46

philosopher-artist, 40, 182

Sivasundaram, Sujit, 13, 43

philosopher-king, 40, 177, 184-86, 190

Soul, 179-88, 190

planetary (framework), 7, 13, 17, 43-44, 231

South Africa, 12, 219-36

poetry, 9, 13, 40, 58-59, 67, 78, 80, 93-103, 106,

South Asia, 10, 20, 29, 60-61, 65, 69, 94-95,

110, 182-83, 193 policing (police), 12, 40, 138, 151-64, 166, 222, 228, 248 politics, 31, 33, 40, 42, 64, 78-79, 172, 180-81,

123-24, 165-66, 172-73, 201, 203, 234 Soviet Union, 76, 79, 132, 221, 225-27, 229, 231-36, 239 sprezzatura, 184

184, 186-87, 204, 207, 209, 221, 225-26, 229,

state violence, 153, 163-64

231-33, 237, 249

Stuart England, 40, 169, 181, 186-88

aesthetic, 115-16

ṣulḥ-i kull, 186

anticolonial, 202, 214

Tamil, 30, 70, 84, 97, 152, 163-64

language, 96-97, 109

Thames River, 169-70, 188

liberatory, 119, 220

Thompson, E.P., 9, 78-79

local, 162

Thrush, Coll, 13, 43

progressive, 123

Universal History, 245-46

radical, 223

Urdu, 30, 122-23

Pollock, Sheldon, 9, 14, 29-30, 40, 64, 75, 83-88, 90, 95, 103, 106 postcolonialism, 12, 23, 28, 31, 86, 115, 118, 120, 132, 201-2, 205-7, 213, 222-23, 225, 227, 230-31, 235-36, 248 Premchand, Munshi, 122-26, 131-32, 137, 139-40, 141-43

vāṅmaya, 95-97, 102, 106-7 vernacular, 9, 11-12, 28-30, 60-64, 67-70, 84-87, 93, 97, 124 violence, 8, 12, 21, 24, 33, 35-36, 39-40, 42, 115-16, 120, 132, 134, 137, 140, 143, 151-53, 157-60, 163-64, 166n44, 204, 206, 231, 249 Warburg school, 191

presentism, 40, 201-2, 204-7, 211-12

Williams, Raymond, 12, 36, 78-79

Ramachandran, Ayesha, 10, 14, 32, 191

world history, 7-9, 12-14, 17, 19-26, 29, 32, 34-35,

realism, 9, 11, 13, 40, 87, 115-16, 119, 121, 123-24, 132-36, 142-43, 194, 222-23, 227 Reformation, 187-88 Renaissance, 10, 58, 67, 169-71, 173, 175-78, 180-81, 183, 188, 191-93 revolution, 26, 43, 48, 61, 79, 81, 85, 97, 134, 202, 204, 208-12, 223, 226, 230-33, 235, 237, 247 riots, 40, 151-52, 154-55, 157-63, 202 Robbins, Bruce, 8, 12, 21-22, 35, 40, 42, 88

37, 39-43, 45-46, 48, 57, 65, 75-77, 79-80, 83, 118-19, 201-2, 206-9, 245-50 world literature, 7-9, 11-13, 17-21, 25, 27-32, 34, 39-43, 47, 57, 62-65, 75-77, 79-80, 83, 93, 97, 107, 117-19, 130, 170, 201-2, 206-12, 219-20, 222-23, 227, 229-30, 236-37, 240, 245-46, 249-50 worldmaking, 10, 12, 14, 17, 32-33