Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia.

Perry, John Oliver

Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Sheldon Pollock, ed. Berkeley. University of California Press (Oxford University Press India, distr.). 2003. xxix + 1066 pages, ill. $80. ISBN 0-520-22821-9

IN HIS CAREFULLY ARGUED IN INTRODUCTION to Literary Cultures in History, distinguished editor Sheldon Pollock explains the highly contemporary scholarly approach of the impressive team (nine of the seventeen being South Asians, most of these, diasporan academics in America) that, since 1994, began producing this monumental, standard-setting, virtually indispensable, and henceforth presumably authoritative volume with which future workers in the field must contend. Pollock explains the collectire's ambitious aims through examining the different present-day definitions and theories concerning what constitutes the various South Asian people, their verbal artifacts, and their appropriate historiographies. Those understandings that reflect what cultures thought of themselves are the primary data, necessarily supplemented by different perspectives and understandings that obtain now. A telling instance of the need for the latter arises when, in Pollock's particular contribution, "Sanskrit Literary Culture," the next and longest essay at ninety-one pages, he subtly details Sanskrit writers' traditional and unchanging notion that (crudely put) neither the Vedas and puranas nor the shastras are "literature," which was delimited as kavya, to be examined and enjoyed in formal aesthetic terms only, having no moral or historical truth.

The initial section of three essays, "Globalizing Literary Cultures," deals with Sanskrit and the other marga literatures of india--that is, those composed in languages used widely and having a more extensive, transregional reach than literatures in languages identified as desi, the subjects of the four later sections: "Literature in Southern Locales," "The Centrality of Borderlands," "Buddhist Cultures and South Asian Literatures," and "The Twinned Histories of Urdu and Hindi" (the most focused section, which includes four essays of some 218 pages). Besides Sanskrit, the two other margas are of ancient and indigenous origin, Prakrit and Apabhramsha; later and more regionally limited, however, they are not the major focus of Pollock's essay. The second essay in this section, "The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan," by Muzaffar Alam, includes more than promised of the usual chronological survey, as does Vinay Dharwadker in "The Historical Formation of Indian-English Literature," the volume's major attraction for most readers.

Note the hyphenation in Dharwadker's title, indicating that Indian English, when compared with Persian (the most influential language in India from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, but interacting with South Asia for two millennia before), has a different kind of hybrid history, perhaps because it is, so far, much shorter, but surely not because it is less important in India today. Restrictive and outdated views that Indian English has "retained an indissoluble final fraction of its alienness" and that "English in Indian-English literature also has to serve as a medium of translation or re-presentation across a gap of irreducible foreignness" should not have been chosen to present the complex, radically shifting history of that literature in this supposedly authoritative volume. This is certainly not how Indian English writers, including their critics, now think of their work.

Dharwadker's historical "coverage," however, is extensive and complex, if not subtle, organized by an array of general terms that ultimately are put into a chart of "semiotic squares": for historical processes, westernization versus modernization parallel and opposed to traditionalism versus Indianization; for locations (a particularly fertile analytical field) empire versus city opposite village versus nation; for ideologies, imperialism versus cosmopolitanism squared with provincialism versus nationalism; for identity positions, mimicry versus ambidexterity paired with authenticity versus solidarity, and for political strategies, collaboration versus reform interacting with revival versus resistance. As for discourses, in the "Heroic Mode," we get colonialist versus modernist; traditionalist versus nationalist; in the "Satiric Mode," the previous four abstractions become "anti-" and are inverted in their order both laterally and horizontally. With this system, Dharwadker identifies each of the major Indian English writers in a structured category and expects that compounded label to mean something significant. To someone with concrete experience of the writers concerned, these descriptions, practically speaking, lack suggestive specificity.

For historically identifying less well-known writers-including those treated in the succeeding sections about desi literatures--that kind of literary history may not be crucial, but here, for example, for V. S. Naipaul, it is disastrous. For example, the late Norman Cutler, in the next essay, "Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture," aims "to illuminate three historically located perspectives on Tamil literature, rather than to offer an omniscient master narrative." But he immediately qualifies that selectivity, explaining "certain recurrent themes provide a mechanism for identifying salient areas ... in some of the forms that Tamil literary culture has taken throughout its history." Decisions about how useful or effective as critical history such perspectives must be made by those widely and deeply knowledgeable in each of the literatures. Meanwhile, clearly this collective effort has laid down a mark for future commentators on South Asia's many literatures--a stunning historical achievement.

John Oliver Perry

Seattle, Washington