Satire, Modernity, Transculturality in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century North India
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Satire, Modernity, Transculturality in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century North India Dissertation an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde in Geschichte Südasiens 2015 vorgelegt von Prabhat Kumar Abteilung Geschichte Südasien-Institut der Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg Betreuer: Professor Dr. Gita Dharampal-Frick Professor Dr. Hans Harder Datum der Disputation: 23.07.2015 Contents Introduction 1-12 0.1 Situating Hindi Satire 2-5 0.2 Organisation of chapters 5-9 0.3 A note on primary sources 9-10 0.4 Acknowledgements and dedication 10-12 1. Delineating Satire, Modernity and Transculturality 13-66 1.1 Transculturality 14-26 1.2 Modernity 26-35 1.3 What is Satire? 35-46 1.4 Historiography of satire 46-66 2. Modernity, Colonialism and Satire in the late 19th Century 67-114 2.1 Confronting the order of colonialism 71-81 2.2 Countering the threats of modernity 81-87 2.3 Silencing the recalcitrance of the modern 88-91 2.4 Mocking the absurdity of equality 91-99 2.5 Satirising technology 100-112 2.6 Summary 113-114 3. Modernity, Scientific Rationality and Satire and in the early 20th Century 115-154 3.1 Ramavatar Sharma: intellectual portrait of an author 118-127 3.2 Mudgarānandˡcaritāvalī: analysis of a text 127-151 3.3 Mudgarānanda and the ‘impossibility of a political agenda’ 151-153 3.4 Summary 153-154 4. Transculturality and Satirical Journalism, 1870-1930 155-209 4.1 Punch: circulation, reception and reincarnation 158-167 4.2 Pañc: Literary forms and political contents 167-183 4.3 From Punch to Matˡvālā: a satirical journal in the age of nationalism 183-190 4.4 Matˡvālā: literary forms and political satire 190-208 4.5 Summary 209 5. Transculturality, Cartoon and Visual Culture, 1900-1940 210-279 5.1 Visual culture and literary periodicals 212-222 5.2 Domesticating a transcultural art form 222-233 5.3 Cartoon and its function in literary journals 233-239 5.4 Cartoon and the poetics of representation 239-275 5.5 A note on the communicative mechanism of cartoon 275-278 5.6 Summary 278-279 Conclusion 280-289 List of Illustrations 290-291 Bibliography 292-313 Introduction The present study is an attempt to unravel the historical dynamics in the making and function of satire as a distinct literary-artistic mode of social expression in the Indian subcontinent. It deals with a historical period which witnessed the triumph and consolidation of British colonial power – an age which connected the Indian subcontinent more directly to the global system of economic and cultural exchange within the asymmetrical matrix of power and, consequently, was indelibly marked by the restructuring and reconfiguration of almost all facets of the subcontinent’s society and culture.1 More precisely, this study explores a much neglected but historically rich material, namely, modern Hindi literary and visual satire (popularly called cartoon) in the newly configured vernacular public sphere of late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial North India. 2 1 Historians like Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others, who have been working on the period from the sixteenth century onwards, have convincingly argued the case for a ‘connected history’ long before the arrival of colonialism. They have demonstrated that the Indian subcontinent was very much part of the global economic and cultural exchange network without being subservient to one or any European power in pre-colonial period. These globally connected historical processes effectively shaped the subcontinent’s politico-cultural formations. See Sanjay Subrahmanayam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia” Modern Asian Studies, 31, 3 (1997): 735-782 and Sanjay Subrahmanayam, Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). This is a good corrective to the dominant strand within earlier historiography (both imperialist and nationalist), which put too much emphasis on British colonialism’s role in connecting India to the world economic and cultural system and assumed pre-colonial India to be largely a closed society. In line with this revisionist scholarship on pre-colonial India, we argue that India was directly connected to the modern imperialist-capitalist system dominated by Western European power under British colonial rule. Under the new historical condition of colonialism, existing socio-cultural formations and sensibilities were not radically destroyed or simply displaced. They were altered and reconfigured; some institutions and forms slowly became redundant, some were rechanneled in a different and new direction. Sugata Bose’s work, which focuses on the history of the Indian Ocean as an ‘interregional arena’, also argues the same. Sugata Bose, Hundred Horizons: Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 2 Unlike the Habermasian ideal public sphere, this is not an open dialogic space of rational debate where the private individual citizen, shorn of (pre-modern) community ties and equipped with the persuasive power of reason, works to arrive at a consensus on the matters of common public good. The Hindi public sphere in colonial India was a deeply segmented space where all forms of hierarchy – linguistic, class, caste, and gender – were at play. It was an open space, but regulated by the colonial regime. It was a space where individuals participated as representatives of the ‘community public’. These representative individuals discussed matters internal to and pertaining to the private realm, addressing their own community public, yet open to the gaze of a wider and differential community public. They 1 1 Situating Hindi Satire As we know through pioneering scholarly works,3 the colonial state, under the imperatives of governmentality –guided by the ideology of what Trautmann calls ‘Mosaic ethnology’ in conjunction with a strong tradition of Indian linguistic scholarship –classified and demarcated many shared and fluid spoken and literary languages in collaboration with ‘native’ informants. 4 spoke in the language of tradition, which was duly marked by the language of (colonial) modernity. In such open spaces participation in the debates did not ensure acceptance of all critical positions. The debate or a critical dialogue could start with a closure by adoption of a singular normative premise and rejection or refusal to engage with of all other premises as deviation from the norm, and hence unacceptable. It did not necessarily lead to a consensus through a reasoned argument and could be open to violent fractures. For the best overview of conceptualizations of the public sphere in colonial India and the critical appraisal of the Habermasian public sphere in general see Neeladri Bhattacharya, “Notes Towards a Conception of the Colonial Public” in Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship: Dialogue and Perspective, eds. Rajeev Bhargava and Helmut Reifeld (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), 130-157. 3 See Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and Language of Command” in Subaltern Studies IV, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276-329; Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Christopher King, One Language Two Script (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994); Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism, Tracts For the Times, 13 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001); Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere: Language and Literature in the Age of nationalism 1920-1940 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Sumit Sarkar, ‘“Middle-class” Consciousness and Patriotic Literature in South Asia’ in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwartz and Sangeeta Ray (Maldon: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 252-268. 4 Increasing centrality of the state in the Indian social order is a phenomenon that starts with colonialism and has no precedence in India. See Sudipta Kaviraj, “On the Enchantment of the State: Indian thought on the role of the state in the narrative of modernity” European Journal of Sociology, 46, 2 (2005): 263-96. Also see chapter 2 “The Mosaic Ethnology of Asiatick Jones” in Trautmann, Aryan and British India, 28-61. Trautmann’s work is a very significant intervention. It effectively answers why and how the ‘language-nation’ project found its legitimacy through linguistic-philological scholarship not anywhere else but in India. This was so because India had a very sophisticated and living tradition of linguistic-philological scholarship; it provided the much-needed methodological causus belli, which in collaboration with native scholars, could be appropriated to realise what this project otherwise wished to prove but failed to substantiate with scholarly rigour. Also see, Chapter 1 “Explosion in Grammar factory” and Chapter 2 “Pāṇini and Tolkāppiyam” in Trautmann, Languages and Nations, 1-41; 42-72, and Gita Dharampal-Frick, Interrogating the Historical Discourse on Caste and Race in India. NMML Occasional Paper, History and Society. New Series 28 (Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2013),