Literature delves into human experiences and is communicated through language. In other words, languages are not simply communicative or reductively informative; they are culturally represented and deeply symbolic. Hence, “Indianness” is hard to condense within the metaphor of the colonial tongue
Literature departments in India face, at least, some sort of a double challenge to reckon with. To begin with, they are endowed with the task of defining how literature posits itself to the Indian mind. This entails how students and teachers locate “Indianness”, and hence, the problem expands to explore the question of some greater identity when exposed to world literature. In this context, let us remember a couple of tenets. Literature is not another discipline under the social sciences despite its increasingly conspicuous dalliance with the latter.
It is a recent academic phenomenon, in vogue since the last five decades. If truth be told, literature has even approached a section of the natural sciences like ecology and the environmental studies to understand greater problems concerning human existence. But literature, with all its body of research, varies radically across its methodological outlooks and soars above any distinct formula to understand the human condition. In short, literature engages with human experiences and their narrative elements, which in themselves, cannot adhere to broader generalities or fit within the “accuracy” of sample sizes. The other tenet would be to understand that engagements with literary practices are essentially plural, poly-vocal and dialogical; there is a plane constructed by literature where identities are not stable. There is a constant, reciprocal process of informing and being informed by other cultures.
“Indianness”, thus, is a fluid and a difficult concept. In a plural society like ours, the term would spread across different languages, cultures and traditions. Indian literature would, within itself, comprise a wide, plethora of perspectives towards life and social interactions. This challenge towards defining “Indianness” within a singular composite term seems to be an impossible task; and hence let us look upon it as an umbrella term which defines all Indian experiences of life. But the more significant caveat to remember is about our colonial past and thus to look into every idea that is still romanticised within the colonial frame of reference.
Here, the suggestion is not to eradicate every non-Indian idea but to engage with them with a critical mind. I use the term “critical” in terms of cultivating a conscious identity of being “non-western”, oriental, South Asian and being “Indic”.
This problem, I believe, is far more real in English departments and it isn’t an arduous task to guess why. The language itself had a foreign identity but for the recent urges of “writing back to the empire” and thus inflecting the language with an Indian flavour. This is the same cultural phenomenon that philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari use to talk about “minorising” the major. It remains uncontested that English is the current language of power and has achieved a hegemonic status in consensus. But the question that we face today is how would an Indian mind deal with a discipline that uses an originally foreign language and a department which has the greatest of its syllabi embedded within the discourses of English speaking nations?
Most academicians would agree that translation is a step in the right discussion. True, but not too much to assure us. Literature delves into human experiences and is communicated through language. In other words, languages are not simply communicative or reductively informative; they are culturally represented and deeply symbolic. Hence, “Indianness” is hard to condense within the metaphor of the colonial tongue. However, since we are condemned to struggle in the same matrices of identities and languages, English is the most relevant medium to reach out to global readership as much as to fellow Indians with a broad linguistic divide.
The question then modifies itself. With English to be used to hear and be heard, how do we root for an “Indianised” perspective? The response might be positive if we understand what it is to have an “emic” perspective. The term “emic” is a contrast to its academic antonym “etic” where the former emphasises on understanding knowledge and culture through the “native” perspective. The etic perspective, of course, is a detached third party view to discourse of culture.
Critics in India might fret over the polarities of ethnocentric narratives against xenocentric narratives to finally lay their thrust behind cultural relativism. Maybe this grants us a safer space to tread away from historical deviances. But “emic” understanding is not essentially “ethnocentric”. It is open to critiquing itself but with a more rigorous and empathetic understanding of its own.
Thus it is not about ethnic narcissism.
However, what it rescues us from is a worrying detachment of one’s own civilisational ethos; a scholarly, almost pedantic isolation of the scholar from their culture to identify themselves as an “intellectual” floating in some self-contained vacuum. This sardonic and disconnected identification is perhaps what categorises the majority of today’s academia. And to burst those bubbles, some sort of an identifying process is necessary. There has to be some truth to one’s culture, traditions and community ideas; critiquing is to pierce through those human realities where the positive and the negative are both thrown open but with a responsible approach.
(The writer is an intern at Institute for Educational and Development Studies, Noida. This article is an outcome of BGS amvahini-2 Internship Programme sponsored by IKS Division, Ministry of Education, Govt of India)