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Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting the Modernity of Tradition

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Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting the Modernity of Tradition Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting the Modernity of Tradition Ananya Vajpeyi n the Hindi film Raincoat (2004), review article we begin to look, Kalidasa and Krishna, Rituparno Ghosh presents a short story Vyasa and Valmiki are everywhere in the Iby O Henry in an Indian milieu. The The Modernity of Sanskrit by Simona Sawhney art and literature of modern India, as are place is contemporary middle class Kolkata; (Ranikhet: Permanent Black; co-published by University of many other authors, characters, tropes the main actors, drawn from Bollywood, Minnesota Press), 2009; pp 226, Rs 495 (HB). and narratives that invariably appear to us are at home in the present. Most of the as familiar, yet differently relevant in dif- conversation between various characters his updating and Indianising O Henry’s ferent contexts. They require no introduc- revolves around cell phones, TV channels, tale, but in his simultaneous reference to tion for any given audience, yet at each soap operas, air-conditioning and auto- post-colonial, colonial and pre-colonial new site where they turn up, as it were, mated teller machines, leaving us in no Bengali culture, and thus to a dense under- there is the interpretive space to figure out doubt as to the setting. But given that the belly of significance that gives weight to what exactly makes them pertinent on story is somewhat slow, and the acting by an otherwise trivial story. Calcutta’s status this occasion. Thus the work of writing the female lead, Aishwarya Rai indifferent as a big city, its urban decrepitude, its faded and reading is always ongoing, always at best, what gives the film its shadowed imperial grandeur and grinding poverty, inter-textual, always citational, and unfolds mood is its beautiful music, and the direc- these we already compute; so too the within a framework that blurs rather than tor’s obvious love for Kolkata. Both these pathos of Radha and Krishna’s separation entrenches the boundary between the tra- elements, strangely, are at odds with the and the impossibility of their reunion, ditional and the modern. Kalidasa counts historical moment sought to be represent- which is nothing other than the universal as an ancient in one reckoning, as the ed. Ghosh himself has written the film’s impossibility of returning to childhood. greatest poet of the Gupta imperium; he is theme song, rendered in soaring notes by Ghosh is clever, then, not in successfully thoroughly modern if we read him via, the Hindustani vocalist Shubha Mudgal. It adapting a piece of American fiction for an say, Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali liter- clearly displays the influence on him of Indian audience, but in attaching these ature or Mohan Rakesh in Hindi literature; the medieval Bengali Vaishnava poets other, rich registers of meaning to the he is also, through other archives and Caitanya, Jayadeva, and others who wrote slender narrative he has chosen. Calcutta’s genres, quite medieval, called and recalled about the love of Krishna and Radha. The modernist decay, as well as the eternal throughout the vernacular millennium. city where the story unfolds is a still-colonial pain of the divine lovers Radha and Krishna Many literary texts and their key protago- Calcutta, with rickshaws pulled by men become grafted on to the protagonists’ nists have this sort of a life, across times, on their feet, pouring rain, slatted wooden thwarted love for each other, and on to spaces, languages, genres and political window-blinds and heavy 19th century their consciousness of time irretrievably contexts in the Indic world. The teak furniture straight out of Satyajit Ray, lost, slipping away like their stolen after- Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyan. a, the life of bridges over the Hooghly river, a train noon together. As the plot, the music and the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gītā, the life of chugging across a flat blue-green land- the images mesh with one another, we Aśoka – these come immediately to mind scape, and the haunting silhouette of the lose track of the temporal context in which (examples could be multiplied). On the one Victoria Memorial. The background re- the events are supposedly embedded. We hand, these are perceived as “classical”; frain, in rustic Hindi and a monsoon- cannot really say what time we are in: on the other hand, we cannot understand appropriate raga, asks of a tormented mythic time (Mathura-Gokul), the deep India’s literary modernity without them homesick Krishna: past (Jayadeva), the medium past (British because they are constantly being made Mathurā nagar-pati Raj), the near past (Mannu and Neeru’s present to us – precisely “re-presented”. Kāhey tum Gokul jāo? youth in Bhagalpur, conveyed through This is a paradox that critics and historians flashbacks), or the present (the long day of are only just beginning to grasp. O Prince of Mathura, the story, in 21st century Kolkata). Here, Let us say that in the evolution of literary- Why would you go back to Gokul? in this synaesthetic synchronic confusion critical discourse, eventually it would be The director’s vaunted talent lies not in of worlds, the sign of art. worked out that modern Marathi litera- his ability to get a decent performance out Indian cinema’s current Wunderkind is ture, say, is deeply engaged with its own past, of Rai (in this he fails – Ajay Devgan’s not the only one to rest his oeuvre on a with that of Sanskrit and Persian, and per- acting is not overwhelming either), nor in layered and complex aesthetic tradition. If haps also with that of other geographically Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 19, 2009 vol xliv no 38 33 REVIEW ARTICLE adjacent and linguistically related lan- Mohandas Gandhi (Gandhi is the odd man saw a hunter kill the male of a pair of cou- guages, dead (like Maharashtri Prakrit) or out in this group of litterateurs, but more pling birds and thus, in a moment of both living (like Kannada).1 Such a working out on that later). When we read this book we judgment (against the hunter) and empathy would also take place for Hindi, Bengali, realise with a shock that lately in the (for the surviving she-bird), gave birth to the southern languages, etc. What inter- humanities, the pressure of theory and the poetic meter; that Dusyanta and Sakuntala’s rupts this imagined course of literary criti- hegemony of history, not to mention the love has contradictory elements of desire cism and literary history, especially in the political economy of translation have basi- and cruelty, a turning towards and a turn- minds of secular intellectuals like Simona cally crowded out literary criticism alto- ing away; that the Buddha’s break with his Sawhney (and before her, G N Devy), is gether.4 We cannot really remember the attachments, like that of many of his fol- the rude barging-in of politics to the uni- last time we encountered, in English, a lowers, involves a shearing conflict be- versity, the library, and the consciousness close, careful reading of any Indian text, tween the injunctive force of asceticism of the studious individual.2 Pankaj Mishra ancient or modern, where the textual object and the persistent attraction of the world; images this interruption very memorably was not subjected to translation, philological that Asvatthama’s father Drona was killed in the thuggish right wing student leaders reconstruction, historical analysis or theo- by treachery because his son shared a who dominate the campus of the Banaras retical treatment. Not that these opera- name with a slain elephant – these are an- Hindu University in his essays and fiction tions are not valid in themselves, but none cient, familiar and repeatedly surprising about Varanasi.3 Hindu nationalism shat- of them does what literary criticism does, stories that never fail to enthral us. Itera- ters the slow rhythms of reasoned self- which, as Sawhney reminds us, is to read tion is everything. In her new book on the reflection, renders cultural self-knowledge the text. She brings the neglected critical Hindus, Wendy Doniger also assembles a at once urgent and endangered. 1990s idiom and the old-fashioned practice of vast compendium, a veritable sea of these Hindutva seizes Rama, or Kurukshetra, criticism back to the table, judging our stories, many of them from Sanskrit litera- turns them into identity symbols through favourite texts in terms of categories like ture that we always already know.5 a massive, mediatised and thoroughly poetry, justice, violence, compassion, If I may be permitted an autobiographical modern type of semiotic violation. Sud- beauty and law, and revisiting a certain kind moment, Sawhney’s self-presentation as an denly all of our plays, poems, novels and of value-based scholarship that we had set ideologically driven latecomer to Sanskrit paintings, our histories and songs, our aside for the last two decades. attracted me. Like her, I too trained in films and television shows, replete with Sawhney’s opening movement, a medita- Anglophone and European literatures, lite- the excess of imaginations preceding or tion on love and memory (both expressed in rary theory and criticism, only to take a turn paralleling our own, become other to us, the word smara) is absolutely the strongest to Sanskrit somewhere in the mid-1990s. taken out of our hands, transformed into part of her uniformly elegant and insight- Like her, I consider myself permanently a weapons with which to hurt and exclude ful book. Further, her careful readings of student of the language, not a scholar of it, non-Hindus from our lives as Indians. Rakesh’s play, Āśād. h kā ek din, Bharati’s and I too qualify my own intellectual prac- Torn out of a cultural conversation that verse drama, Andhā Yug, Hazariprasad tice with labels like “history”, “theory” may extend over millennia and a sub- Dwivedi’s, Buddhadeb Bose’s and Rabindra- and “secularism”.
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