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Rohatgi, Rashi (2012) Fighting cane and canon: reading Abhimanyu Unnuth's Hindi poetry in and outside of literary Mauritius. PhD Thesis. SOAS, University of London http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/16627 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination. Fighting Cane and Canon: Reading Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Hindi Poetry In and Outside of Literary Mauritius Rashi Rohatgi Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Languages and Cultures of South Asia 2012 Supervised by: Dr. Francesca Orsini and Dr. Kai Easton Departments of Languages and Cultures of South Asia School of Oriental and African Studies University of London 1 Declaration for PhD Thesis I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of the School of Oriental and African Studies concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all of the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that any quotation or paraphrase from published or unpublished work of another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for examination. Signed: Rashi Rohatgi Date: 3/2/2013 2 Abstract Fighting Cane and Canon: Reading Abhimanyu Unnuth’s Hindi Poetry In and Outside of Literary Mauritius interrogates the development and persistence of Hindi poetry in Mauritius with a focus on the early poetry of Abhimanyu Unnuth. His second work, The Teeth of the Cactus , brings together questions about the value of history, of relationships forged by labour, and of spirituality in a trenchant examination of a postcolonial people choosing to pursue prosperity in an age of globalization. It captures a distinct point of view—Unnuth’s connection to the Hindi language is an unusual reaction to the creolization of the island—but also a common experience: both of Indian immigrants and of the reevaluation of their experience by Mauritians reaching adulthood, as Unnuth did, with the Independence of the Mauritian nation in 1968. I argue that for literary scholars, reading Abhimanyu Unnuth’s poetry raises important questions about the methodological assumptions made when approaching so-called marginal postcolonial works—assumptions about translation, language, and canonicity—and that the emerging methodologies of World Literature have much to offer. I test them here, providing the first translation into English of The Teeth of the Cactus and an analysis in which I focus on the relationship between my own perspective, the perspectives of Unnuth’s imagined audience, and the perspectives of his actual historical audience. The fading legacy of The Teeth of the Cactus amongst its historical audience signals the decline of a vibrant era where Hindi poetry was central to the nation-building project of Mauritius; poets writing after Unnuth markedly position themselves as diasporic poets, and Unnuth’s commitment to being a World Poet diminishes his importance in Mauritius while increasing his importance to literary scholars of World Literature. 3 Contents Abstract 3 Chapter 1: Rethinking the Global in Postcolonial Poetry 5 Chapter 2: Translating The Teeth of the Cactus 49 Chapter 3: Unnuth and the Indian Labour Diaspora 111 Chapter 4: A Parallel Progressive 171 Chapter 5: Re-membering the Worlds of Failed Poetry 236 Bibliography 299 Appendices 320 Acknowledgements: The research for this thesis was funded in part by the SOAS Fieldwork Grant, Conference Grant, and the University of London Central Research Fund Fieldwork Grant Schemes. I would also like to thank Francesca Orsini and Kai Easton for their feedback and support throughout, Parvathi Raman for her help with the first stages of the project, and Martin Orwin, Ananya Kabir, and Michaela Unterbarnscheidt for their detailed feedback on the penultimate and final drafts. Additionally, thanks to Jason Grunebaum, A. Sean Pue, and Michael Scammell for guiding me on early versions of the translations, and again to Francesca Orsini for helping me finalise them. My fieldwork would not have been successful without the help of Kamal Kishore Goenka, as well as many Mauritians: the Bheeroo family, the Nobutsings, Raj Heeramun, Hemraj Soonder, Kalpana Lalji, Kessen Buddhoo, Jeewan Mohit, Gulshan Sooklall, Vinaye Goodary, the 2010-2011 BA Hindi class at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, those who wish to remain unnamed, and especially Abhimanyu Unnuth himself. Sections of the thesis draft were shared at the Spalding Symposium in 2008, the British Association for South Asian Studies Conference in 2010, and the Mauritius and the Indian Ocean Conference in 2011, and I would like to thank in particular Dermot Killingley, Stephanie Jones, and Shivani Rajkomar for their feedback and support. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their support. 4 Chapter 1: Rethinking the Global in Postcolonial Poetry I. Context and Perspectives ‘have you heard?’ 1 Thus begins The Teeth of the Cactus , a collection of poetry by Abhimanyu Unnuth. The poem ‘And Burn Something Else’ opens his second collection, published in 1982. ‘[H]ave you heard?’ he asks us, that ‘my desire to live has killed itself?’ In the original Hindi, Unnuth uses the verbal construction that implies ‘has killed itself for your sake.’ As a reader, I lift my hands from the book to check my fingerprints: am I the ‘you’? Who, then, is the ‘I’? An instinctive rush of guilt runs through us, but it is checked: no one has really died. Just desire. Can I be held responsible for nurturing or destroying the desire to live of one I’ve never met? If not I, then what does, or should, nurture the desire to live? ‘[H]ave you heard?’ he writes, that ‘my desire to live has killed itself on the threshold of the labour office.’ Hearing these words, the poem rushes back to a physical location, and ‘you’ has a taken on, perhaps, a more corporeal identity: the man in the Labour Office. I have my own pictures of Labour Office men: stuffed suits, dhotis. The poem concludes, ‘the death certificate cannot be obtained, for today is May Day, a public holiday. On the funeral pyre, burn something else.’ Who is this Labour Office man, too busy commemorating dead labourers to nurture in living ones the desire to live? Those forthright sentences close the poem and open up a series of poems questioning the relationships between the administrators and the administered, between the desire to live and the desire to remember. 1 ‘And Burn Something Else.’ #1. In the course of the thesis, poems from The Teeth of the Cactus will be cross-referenced by a numeral, which refers to the ordering of the poems in the collection as well as to the ordering of the translated poems, found on pages 74-109. Original found in: Abhimanyu Unnuth, Kaikṭus ke Dānt (New Delhi: Gyaan Bharati, 1982), 1. 5 The Teeth of the Cactus was published in Delhi, but circulated and read mainly in Unnuth’s native Mauritius. It was eagerly awaited by Mauritian Hindi litterateurs who had enjoyed his first collection, The Prickly-Pear’s Tangled Breath , rife with flashes of righteous anger and the island’s natural imagery. Somdath Bhuckory, an author of literature himself as well as the author of Hindi in Mauritius , considered Unnuth to be ‘foremost among post-Independence poets.’ 2 The collection, with eighty six poems of varying lengths, develops the themes of the first collection—labour, history, imprisonment, and nature both human and environmental—and grapples with questions affecting postcolonial Mauritius: how can a life be made worth living? Who has power over the lives of citizens of a self-governing nation, and what kind of relationship should those citizens have with power? But why is it even necessary to learn the collection’s most basic context? Why not take each word as it comes? Reading such evocative lines as ‘In the past those pills I used to suck were insipid outside and in. Nowadays those I suck are sugar- coated tablets against the future’s bitterness,’ 3 I, as a reader, may identify with strong feelings of despair, but I am also led to ask from whence these feelings arise. As a reader in a global literary world, I am often faced with poems that are simultaneously relatable and opaque. In the lines quoted above, an untitled short poem from later in The Teeth of the Cactus , I can empathise with the feelings of despair, but without knowledge of the original context, I can only fill in the gaps with my own experience (whether gained first-hard or through my previous reading). Even the basic context already provided helps me clarify my relationship to the text. Literature about power relationships in a postcolonial society that differs from my own postcolonial society is interesting to me because I have already found 2 Somdath Bhuckory, Hindi in Mauritius, 2nd ed. (Rose-Hill, Mauritius: Éditions de L'Océan Indien, 1988), 126. 3 ‘Sugar-Coated.’ #23. Abhimanyu Unnuth, Kaikṭus ke Dānt (New Delhi: Gyaan Bharati, 1982), 28. 6 literature about power relationships in societies with which I do have experience to be resonant.