Cultural determination of literary theory.
Kapoor, Kapil
A theory being an expression of a community's understanding
(and expectation) of an object, it is inevitably determined by the
intellectual culture of that community and shares in its wider
assumptions about life and matters. One can show this cultural
determination in respect of several major issues of literary theory in
India.
Because India has been, and is, an oral culture, our conceptual
categories of literary theory are rooted in oral compositions,
renditions and performances and therefore many key concepts and issues
of Western literary theory are not pertinent for Indian literary
experience. Examples that prominently come to mind are the twin concepts
of "writer" and "reader", the name
"literature" itself, and the issue for example of
"authorial meaning". The notion of "writing"
implicit in the word "writer" renders inappropriate this
conception of an author in a tradition of oral compositions. One would
rather talk neutrally of a "composer", just as the Greeks
talked of a "maker" (vate). The word "composer",
apart from denoting only a mental process of putting together
ideas/words, has the advantage of suggesting a certain relationship with
musical composition, which is a valid association in that an oral
literary composition is, besides other things, a structure of sounds
(speech-sounds', and is therefore, assumed to have in Indian
literary theory "an appeal for the ear", aural-interest,
sravya, which is one of the two major attributes of any literary
composition, preksa or visual interest, being the other. In the same way
"reader" is a term that does not apply to the body of Indians
for whom literary compositions are intended. We cannot talk of
"reading" as the only or dominant mode of processing a
literary text. In fact the dominant modes are "hearing" and
"watching". So we have a complex processor of literary
texts-hearer--viewer --reader. No one term would suffice to describe
this complex function. We may appropriate the term "auditor"
that Shelley uses in A Defence of Poetry, to express this complex of
functions. The term "literature" itself, on account of its
derivation from the root that means "letters" is inappropriate
to describe the vast body of oral compositions, and the designation
"oral literature" is really a contradiction in terms. We have
in our tradition of literary thought a very apt term vanmaya which
literally means "(that which is) permeated by/ has existence in
speech vak, that is, language" and designates all verbal discourse
including literary discourse. The other term, sahitya, made popular by
the title of the 14th century theorist Viswanatha's book on
literary theory, Sahitya-darpana has its origin in Bhamaha's
definition of literary discourse--sabda, word; artha, meaning; sahitau
indivisibility together; kavyam literary discourse; i.e. word and
meaning together constitute literary discourse, which is a remarkable
semiotic definition of literature by this seventh century literary
theorist. All this shows that theory specific constructs are also
culturally specific.
Take the question of "authorial intention", which is a
major issue in the Western debate about literary meaning. At one time it
was believed that the meaning of a text is the meaning intended by the
writer--so the exegetical task is to reconstruct the author's
intention by taking recourse to biography, i.e., history of the writer,
the work and the age. With the death of the author, which followed upon
the death of God in the Christian World in the 19th century, this
concept acquired new dimensions. It led to an investigation of the very
process of composition and it was postulated that the author perhaps
exercised no control on his writing and that the texts virtually wrote
themselves. Also that the author, an individual, has no existence as an
individual, but is in fact a product of conglomerate social factors and
circumstances. These are very significant ideas, and of value to all.
However, the core concept of "authorial intention" does not
apply in the Indian literary compositions which are more often than not
characterized by an anonymity of authorship and this is so even when we
know that Kalidasa is the author of Meghdoot. But then it is
Kalidasa--we do not know who he was, when exactly he was born, how long
did he live, what was his philosophical creed or religious persuasion
and what food did he like? The name is no more than a marker, and is an
equivalent of "X". The Indian world view does not attach any
importance to the individual and the particular and the Indian mind
constantly searches for patterns and paradigms of human
experience--hence the marked preference for myth as a narrative mode.
This anonymity is a feature of both the Sastras (philosophical
treatises) and Kavya (imaginative compositions). Since the authorship is
anonymous, there is no question of interpreting a literary text in terms
of the author's intended meaning--instead the meaning has to be
located autonomously in the text itself. No wonder therefore that the
Indian literary theories are theories that are concerned with
explicating how meaning is constituted and through what devices. They
are all rooted in linguistics, the science of language which is the
medium of literature, and therefore show remarkable affinities with the
twentieth-century literary theories that had their origin in the
linguistic revolution of de Saussure.
Consider now the question of preferred forms. In modern India one
can see a divide between urban and rural literatures, between literate
and oral and between literary and folk or popular literatures. In the
dominant rural oral folk literatures the preferred forms are verse
narratives (heroic and romantic) and short plays meant for performance
in the open ground. Successful compositions, in both these forms, have
both aural and visual interest for the audience sravya, preksa. These
compositions in the manner of true orality are properly
de-contextualised i.e., carry no information about the contexts of
composition, seek not to inform the audience but to evoke certain states
of being (emotional conditions) in them. Between the two, the Indian
mind prefers the narrative witness, for example, the existence of the
world's two major epics, Mahabharata and Ramayana, and the
existence of innumerable heroic and romantic narratives (akhyana, katha,
kissa, etc.) in the literatures of all the major Indian languages. It is
to be noted that these narrative compositions, particularly the epics,
have strong dramatic elements and in fact, when they are enunciated they
are performed as well as recited.
Consider next the questions of creativity, creative process and the
sources of creativity. In the very origins of the Western tradition, in
Plato (Republic, X) the carpenter is cited, and discussed as the
paradigm artist, the first imitator of the ideational reality, who
creates/who makes the appearance of them but not the reality and the
truths this is a culture specific conception of "truth",
"reality", and "appearance". In the Indian
tradition, the metaphor for the artist is the "Kumbhakara",
the potter, and this conceptualizes a very different creative process.
The carpenter creates by measuring, segmenting and rearranging the
medium--he is a geometrician dealing with the spatial reality. His
creation is a rearrangement of elements. The potter does not work by
segmenting and rearranging his material--his material, the clay, does
not allow the precise segmenting that the wood is amenable to. In fact,
the potter works with a lump of clay and what he does is to shape (as
against re-arrange) the material with his alive hands to bring out (not
create) the form which inheres in the material. The form is there, as
dharma or karya (of karana, clay) as the Yoga philosophy claims
(Patanjali's Yoga-sutras), and it is visualized by the artist--he
sees the form in his mind's eye. His creativity lies in making
manifest this privately visualized form, and the creative process is the
process of transcription. In literature, it would mean shaping of the
language-material to approximate and express what the writer has
conceived. The success of the artist, the element of beauty in his work,
rests in how well he shapes the material. He has to so shape the
material that the bhava, the essence, of the object can be cognized by
the viewer/reader; that is, bhavabodha is possible. The Indian theory of
representation does not insist on an exact reproduction of the
appearances, the surface reality, the lineaments and the wrinkles on a
face or the rills in a landscape. In the backdrop of a philosophy that
does not accept appearance as the whole or even partially significant
reality, the theory of art enjoins upon the artist the task of making
manifest that essential reality, the being, which lies beyond the
apparent form and name of the object. This essential reality, not being
apparent, is grasped only by those who have a special perception, kranta
darsinah, men and women capable of direct appreciation by virtue of
their capacity for deep meditation, for the essential reality, the being
of an object can be perceived or felt, only in the inner self.
This process of meditation, the process of imaging, has been
explicated by the Buddhist thinkers in their discussions of theories of
art the artist begins with a ceremonial purification of the self, for
the sublime conceptualization and expression requires a certain degree
of purity, both physical and mental. He, then, withdraws to a solitary
place, for the mind remains distracted in crowded places and routines.
For ekagrata, one-pointed and focused consciousness, one needs solitude
which makes it possible for one to be alone with one's own self. In
the third stage, the artist offers daily acts of worship to the
deity/object he proposes to transcribe or represent. That is, the artist
cultivates through ritual performance, an attitude of love and reverence
for the object-only with love and reverence, does the mind become aware
of the beauty of the object, as an object takes on the beautiful hues
when we look upon it with love and reverence. In the next stage, the
artist consciously cultivates and realizes in thought what are called
the four "infinite moods" of friendliness, compassion,
sympathy, impartiality so that the artist's self is cleansed of all
the negative feelings and vibrations and acquires a vastness and a
tolerance fit for "sublime" subject and repression, for as
Longinus had said (in On the Sublime) that no one who has led a mean and
petty life can comprehend great or noble thoughts and subjects. In the
fifth stage, the artist meditates on the vast emptiness (sunyata) to
destroy his ahamkara, the consciousness of self, which would otherwise
intervene between him and the object of his meditation. And then in the
sixth stage he repeats and meditates on the bijamantra, that is, the
grand attribute(s) of the object or deity. He inculcates these powers
and attributes in his own self and experiences the strength and devotion
of Hanumana, the filial piety of Rama, the naughty self of the child
Krishna, the compassion of Buddha, and the introversion of Mahavira. And
once he is permeated by the attributes of the objects, he meditates on
the dhyana-mantra--that is, he brings up to his mind's eye the form
of the object or deity. Now, so deep and total is the mind's
concentration on the object, that the object or deity virtually appears
before him--as if it is actually present. It is said in the tradition
for example, that when Valmiki was to compose Ramayana, then all the
events actually unfolded before him and all the characters appeared in
person to him.
This is a theory of creativity which assumes that the artist has
complete knowledge in advance of what he is going to represent or
compose. This is evidently different from the modern theory that claims
that the text writes itself and the artist is merely an instrument and
does not know in which direction his narrative and his characters will
proceed. The Indian conception of knowledge allows some gifted minds to
comprehend, with equal felicity, the past, the present and the future,
and a great artist is a gifted mind that understands the totality of the
object, its past, present and future, becomes inward with it, before
transcribing it.
The relationship between the artist and the object is not one of
dominance by the artist--he is not a "creator" in the Indian
tradition. He is a sadhaka, a worshipper; a yogi, an ascetic; a bhakta,
a worshipper; who is full of love and reverence for the object of his
thoughts, and his art is a form of meditation or prayer. The aesthetic
experience is a sacred experience. The artist is mentally and
spiritually a worshipper and in the actual handling of his material, a
craftsman--the sculptor and the mason--are alike. So Panini (in
Astadhyayi) while mentioning various guilds of craftsmen also mentions
the poet's guilds. One can contrast this conception with the
Western conception of the artist as a creator on the analogy of God as
the prime creator. In Platonic thought and tradition, the source of the
artists' creativity is in divine inspiration. In the Indian thought
there are three sources of creativity (vide, Rajasekhara,
Kavyamimamsa)--abhyasa (practice), vyutpatti (derivation; study or
knowledge of existing art or literature) and pratibha (inborn ability;
intuition). The artist has an innate ability, but he must study and
become familiar with the practice of the earlier masters, and then he
must practice his own art constantly. Indian philosophers, musicians,
dancers, architects and poets, all display these three attributes.
Consider now, the relationship that holds between the
audience/reader and the object of art. With reference to literature,
three distinct stages in the evolution of ideas in this respect can be
discerned. In Bharata's Natyasastra, we have the notion of
preksaka, an observer, an impersonal observer or receiver of the text.
In the 6th/7th century, in Bhamaha, Vamana, we have a revised
notion--the notion of samajika, a social being, a participant in a
collective performance as it were. Finally, in Anandavardhana, 9th
century A.D., we get the concept of a sahrdaya, literally "of the
same heart"; that is, that reader/viewer/hearer can fully
comprehend and appreciate a work of art who has the same intellectual
and emotional equipment, the same sensibility, as the artist.
The three stages in the conception of a "reader" are also
indicative of the specific relationship that obtains between the text
and the audience in the Indian socio-cultural reality. This is a
multiple and complex relationship's perhaps one would expect in an
oral tradition. The texts are performed, narrated, studied, and enounced
(ritual enunciation.). They are used for education (in Kathas, oral
recitations/narrations), for ritual purposes in ceremonies for (crisis
management in situations of distress such as defeat in or prospect of
war) and for intellectual advancement (adhyayana or study). As against
the monistic reader-function in which the modern reader relates to
literature in a literate society, in India, very complex
relationship--socio-cultural relationship holds between an individual
and his texts, and in that complex relationship, the reading-function is
only a minor function, as most Indians learn their texts through hearing
(varied folk/ oral narrations) and watching (varied fold, oral
performances). For example, more people have become acquainted with
episodes from the Mahabharata through Teejan Bai's performances
than through individual study. In this perspective of the oral
tradition, the visual media, the television and the videos, for example,
are perfect instruments of communication and fit in beautifully with the
Indian traditions of experiences of art and literature. Is it any
wonder, therefore, that Ramayana and Mahabharata were such eminent
successes and had more than 90% viewership. In India, watching them
every Sunday became almost sacred act, a ritual with Indian families.
KAPIL KAPOOR
PROF. OF ENG. & CONCURRENT PROF. OF SANSKRIT
CENTRE OF LINGUISTICS & ENG. SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY, NEW DELHI--110067
KAPIL KAPOOR
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
