Literature and the Politics of Identity in Orissa Lct'lo60 -Ul
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Literature and the Politics of Identity in Orissa lCt'Lo60 -Ul Lopamudra Tripathy Department of Political Studies School of Oriental and African Studies University of London ProQuest Number: 10673038 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673038 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 Abstract Literature and the Politics of Identity in Orissa 1920 -1960 The aim of this study is to understand how literature reflects and contributes to the politics of identity. This study is not a history of Oriya literature, nor does it deal with the process of gradual crystallization of Oriya political identity. This research is based on the assumption that creative literature projects a collective identity of a people and sustains a dominant discourse on the society that it writes about. Further, it supports the assumption that a narrative, apart from performing the symbolic act of creating and reproducing social cohesion, is a specific mechanism through which the collective consciousness of a society often represses its historical contradictions. Since this work is based on literary sources, it discussed the processes through which creative writers make sense of the world around them and represent this world to their readership. The evolution of the identity of a region is rarely a linear development, or the subject of a simple, homogeneous construction. Any invocation of identity is fraught with internal tensions and contestations. Different groups of people within the same region often question the validity of a particular construction of their identity, claiming that it represents only one aspect of reality and not others. But the theme of identity is constantly invoked in the context of a nation’s formation, to emphasise national and cultural differences with other nations. In the context of a modem nation, this construction of identity is deeply involved in the interpretations of the nation’s past. The first chapter of this thesis discussed the political conditions under which the Oriya speaking tracts of the British empire demanded unification, leading to the emergence of Orissa as a separate province in 1936. This was the fust time when the Oriya people felt the need to articulate an identity of a modem kind. This chapter is divided into three sections which discuss the coming of modernity to Orissa and the social transformations that followed. It also analyses the colonial missionary and Bengali discourses on the nature of Oriya society, and the first stages of the Oriya constructions of the self. The second chapter discusses literary writing and articulation of Oriya by a group of writers closely associated with the national movement from 1920 onwards. They articulated new meanings that helped constitute a picture of Oriyaness. Their emphasis was on raising an all-India consciousness among the Oriyas but the symbols of mobilisation were strictly Oriya. The third chapters discusses the slow disenchantment of Oriya writers with the coming of modernity, and the consequent rise of a discourse that was nostalgic about the Oriya past. Identity was closely linked to the questions of social morality in this phase. Matters and aspects of everyday lives - like the nature of the traditional social formation, social relations among different groups, the joint family, the image of women - were the given a new status as ‘tradition’ and presented as crucial to an Oriya identity. This chapter deals with the literary expression of the frustration that various social groups, rural Oriyas, tribal or women experienced with the coming of change. It discusses an identity crisis of Oriya society reflected in literature of the decades following the twenties. The fourth chapter discusses the connection of Left writing with the problem of identity formation. What was described as ‘quintessentially Oriya’ was questioned and rejected by leftist intellectuals. Radical literature created a set of ‘alternative’ Oriya heroes, and provided an alternative reading of what was valuable in society and its historical past. Deeply critical of the earlier construction of Oriyaness, tire leftwing writers questioned the validity of the elitist construction of the Oriya self. In the cultural self-construction of Oriya identity, the figure of Jagannath, the deity of the temple at Puri, has always enjoyed a special place. The fifth chapter turns to a discussion of Jagannath as the ‘national god’ of Orissa and its centrality to any reading of Oriyaness. The chapter analyses the changing relations between modernity and religion. It seeks to show the historical process by which a traditional religious symbol retained its cultural significance in a modem definition of a society’s identity. INTRODUCTION This thesis tries to understand the manner in which literature contributes to the making of identity and, once an identity has been formed, how literature facilitates the re-circulation and confirmation of this identity. The literary process of defining a community-self is a part of the wider aspect of cultural construction of the nation; the way culture contributes to the making up of national life, the historical specificities which prompt the production and the continuance of certain cultural characteristics. Literature forms a very important aspect of this cultural process especially in the making of an idea of Oriyaness and particularly the forms in which it reflects the shifts and contestations in Oriya identity. While this claim of literature reflecting identity is not a new assertion, nevertheless, this process of reflection has to be analysed in each specific context, because the contingent conditions that make up both literature and identity in each region are different. Two things motivated this work. First, the lack of literature in Orissa which attempted to relate the question of identity to everyday forms of life. Secondly, most academic interrogations on Oriya society and identity have been confined to the period from the mid-19th century till 1936, the year Orissa got its status as an independent province. The Oriya nation did not stop forming after 1936 nor did questions of identity stop bothering the Oriyas after the apparent settlement of its political identity. Rather the question of self-definition became more intense because they had to be sorted out on an everyday basis. While some literary theorists represent literature as 'organised violence committed on ordinary language' and relegate the 'content' to a secondary status, others assert that even in its deviation from ordinary speech it helps us understand the complexity of our experiences. It helps to comprehend the totality of varied experiences by structuring and organising it in the form of stories. If we accept Lukacs's suggestion that novels are an allegory of class relations, we might extend it to suggest that social reality, values, social structure and its organising principles find expression in literature, which in turn is closely linked to the creation of cohesion and maintenance of group solidarities. Among other forms, literature is one of the ways in which communication among members of the community occurs. It is through this that implicit agreements on values etc. are recreated, re-circulated and brought to the level of explicit consciousness of the community. It can be seen that wherever modernity appears, it quickens patterns of change or disturbs established patterns. Societies going through this process of transformation in their basic structures find ways of collective reflection on this process. In the history of the west, this process of historical reflection is done by social theory complemented by literature. In the Indian context, literature performs the act of reflecting on contemporary history and directing historical 1 analysis. It needs to be mentioned that in India traditionally there was no equivalent of modem social theory which would facilitate theoretical and historical reflection on the self. This work of self-reflection on the direction in which society was moving, came from literary sources which performed a function similar in some ways to modem social theory. In fact, the term 'upanyasa’( novel) means a statement properly presented or arranged in an orderly manner. In Telegu, the word even today does not mean a novel but refers to a discourse or a speech. While history selects significant events as its subject, literature supplements history by reflecting changes in the manner of everyday living. Unlike factual history, literature records informal and anonymous events that typify everyday life. This continual process of complementarity between history and literature runs through this work. Certain texts make particularly forceful contributions to the construction of a community's identity and have the potential to be interpreted politically. Literary texts assign new meanings and different directions to the process of historical change, recreate meaning and represent it to the community again. Narratives perform the symbolic act of creating and reproducing cohesion. Narrative is also a specific mechanism through which the collective consciousness often represses historical contradictions. Literary narrative often moves along contradictory courses. The novel acts as a symbolic resolution of the real contradiction, to solve it at an imaginary level or repress a lived dilemma. In some senses the text is a socially symbolic act; it is an act in that it tries to do something to the world but symbolic in the sense that it leaves the world of social relations untouched. An author cannot write in a manner which would not make sense to the reader.