Late Colonial Sublime: Neo Epics and the End of Romanticism

UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Late Colonial Sublime: Neo Epics and the End of Romanticism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9st5w2b4 ISBN 978-8101-3648-9 Author Sahota, G. S. Publication Date 2018-02-09 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Late Colonial Sublime The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on page 279. Late Colonial Sublime Neo- Epics and the End of Romanticism G. S. Sahota northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Sahota, G. S., author. Title: Late colonial sublime : neo-epics and the end of Romanticism / G. S. Sahota. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series: FlashPoints Identifiers: LCCN 2017022781| ISBN 9780810136496 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136489 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136502 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Hindi literature—India—19th century—History and criticism. | Hindi literature—India—20th century—History and criticism. | Urdu literature—India—19th century—History and criticism. | Urdu literature—India—20th century—History and criticism. | Romanticism—India. | Sublime, The, in literature. Classification: LCC PK2037 .S24 2018 | DDC 891.4309—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022781 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.4811992. For Siddhartha S. Sahota τὸν δ᾽ αὖτε προσέειπε συβώτης, ὄρχαµος ἀνδρῶν: ‘ξεῖν᾽, ἐπεὶ ἂρ δὴ ταῦτά µ᾽ ἀνείρεαι ἠδὲ µεταλλᾷς, σιγῇ νῦν ξυνίει καὶ τέρπεο, πῖνέ τε οἶνον ἥµενος. αἵδε δὲ νύκτες ἀθέσφατοι: ἔστι µὲν εὕδειν, ἔστι δὲ τερποµένοισιν ἀκούειν: οὐδέ τί σε χρή, πρὶν ὥρη, καταλέχθαι: ἀνίη καὶ πολὺς ὕπνος. “My friend,” the swineherd answered, foreman of men, “you really want my story? So many questions—well, listen in quiet, then, and take your ease, sit back and drink your wine. The nights are endless now. We’ve plenty of time to sleep or savor a long tale.” —Homer, Odyssey, 15.389– 94 (trans. Robert Fagles [New York: Penguin, 1999], 331–32). The epic is not merely a genre but a way of life. —Harry Levin, preface to The Singer of Tales E riportiamo anche la conclusione poco confortante: noialtri europei, e sopratutto noialtri francesi, abbiamo la tendenza all’egocentrismo. Ci crediamo centro dell’universo e immaginiamo appena che fuori di noi, fuori della nostra vecchia sfera continentale, vi siano dei grandi movimenti d’attività umana, dove stanno elaborandosi già degli avvenimenti che potranno avere delle ripercussioni decisive sui nostri destini. Alla guerra europea non potrà molto tardare la guerra delle colonie. And we arrive at this hardly comforting conclusion: We Europeans, and especially we French, have a tendency toward egocentrism. We believe ourselves the center of the universe and we can barely imagine that beyond us, beyond our old continental sphere, there are huge upsurges of human action such that there are events already developing which can have decisive repercussions on our destiny. It is only a matter of time before the war in the colonies becomes the European war. —Antonio Gramsci, “La Guerra e Le Colonie,” in Nel mondo grande e terribile: Antologia degli scritti 1914– 1935 (my translation) Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Aporias of Modernity 3 part i. fractured frames: imperial parallax and disjointed time 1. Commodity and Sublimity: Mimesis of the Immaterial 29 2. Romanticism’s Horizons, or The Transmission of Critique 54 3. Atmospherics of Imperialism: Benjamin’s Sublime 96 part ii. neo- epic constellation: out of british india 4. Hali’s Transvaluation of Modernity: Allegories of Marsiya 127 5. Iqbal, or the Sturm und Drang of Late Colonial India: Resemblances of Pure Content 143 6. Utility and Culture: Modern Subjectivity and Neotraditional Aesthetics 172 Epilogue: Melancholic Ornament: TV Ramayana, Nostalgia, and Kitsch as Counter- Enlightenment 209 Appendix A. Translation of Muhammad Iqbal’s Preface to Payam- e Mashriq (Message of the East) 233 Appendix B. Translation of Sumitranandan Pant’s “The Usefulness of the Epic Form in the Modern Age” 242 Notes 247 Index 273 Acknowledgments “And is the life of a thinking person anything more than a steady inner symphilosophy?” Thus asks rhetorically the German romantic Novalis, borrowing fittingly a term coined by his fellow Jena school theorist of die Romantik, Friedrich Schlegel. The present work may be con- sidered an investigation into a “symromanticism” involving ever more complicated borrowings and exchanges of thought forms across imperial divides for which no accounting or settling of debts is possible or necessary. Not only was independent invention always a potentiality on all sides of this literary history, but whatever was borrowed was elaborated with such ardor that its value exceeded what it had been initially— each paying back thus an indebting, requiring a cycle of com- pensation in turn. It would be better to see the dynamics of indebtedness in any symphilosophy in absolute terms as a borrowing of energies that sustain a critical life- thought with no reduction to a zero balance ever again possible or even desirable. Eternal gratitude is the flip side of the luck of happy indebtedness. It has been my good luck to have accrued manifold debts in the process of completing this book. Susan Gillman was assigned to me as the FlashPoints series editor very early in the process and stayed with the project even during its least promising moments, always offering boundless enthusiasm and penetrating criticisms through her diamond- sharp sparkle and anarchic wit. An ever more explicit engagement with translation in the course of revising this work is due to her reasoned xi xii ❘ Acknowledgments urgings. Gianna Francesca Mosser, editor in chief at Northwestern University Press, facilitated rounds of anonymous external reviews of the manuscript with unwavering integrity and efficacy. I also thank the two anonymous readers: their comments were aimed at improving the work down to the last detail; if it still needs improvement, the fault is mine alone. It was also my good fortune to have skated happily through a public education system right into the midst of some of the most illustrious scholars and intellectuals the world has recently known in the humanities and social sciences. If the work displays any modicum of philologi- cal rigor, it is not least for attempting to mimic the scholarly discipline and synthetic intelligence of Sheldon Pollock and Muzaffar Alam. For its critical apparatus I owe a great deal to the Social Theory Work- shop at Chicago, especially its stewards, Moishe Postone and William Sewell, for generating widely ramifying and relevant discussions. The earlier guides into the disparate bodies of knowledge that make up this book, Dilip Basu, Jonathan Beecher, Edmund Burke III, James Clif- ford, Robert Goldman, and Hayden White, all from my deeply impres- sionable undergraduate days, have left an indelible mark on many of its main contours. Dilip is no longer with us. I had waited too long to share with him the sections on Tagore and Datta, which were written with his adage always in mind: to give priority to the primary sources in any account; that is what I attempted in these parts, despite the risks. It is to his memory now that those sections are dedicated. This book has taken me to, and in turn reflects, various locations around the world. In these diverse places, colleagues and loosely affili- ated members of distinct universities and institutions have provided a rich and challenging intellectual climate in which to think. I would like to thank the entire Literature Department

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