God and the Novel in India Bina Gogineni
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God and the Novel in India Bina Gogineni Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Bina Gogineni All rights reserved ABSTRACT God and the Novel in India Bina Gogineni The novel—especially the realist novel—has been generally understood as a secular, disenchanted form, but the history of the Indian novel complicates this view. A seminal trajectory of realist novels situated in India, by native and non-resident writers alike, presents a perception of God in the daily that is rooted in Indian religious traditions—in contradistinction to the deus absconditus European realist novel which has generally restricted itself to the secular sphere. Despite the conspicuous and consequential enchantment of the Indian novel, even postcolonial literary critics have followed in the critical tradition that takes secularism to be the precondition of the novel and dismisses instantiations of religion as mere anomaly, symptom, or overlay. I contend that the powerful realism brought to India by the British novel was immediately injected with a strong dose of enchantment drawn from the popular religious and mythopoetic imagination. The novel invited God to come down to earth to become more real and more compatible with a self-consciously secularizing India unwilling to dispense with its spiritualism; reciprocally, God’s presence in the naturalist novel engendered a radically new sense of both the genre and reality. Of all the existing art forms in India, it was only the realist novel—with its worldly orientation—that could give shape to the “profane illumination” in everyday life and provide a forum for the praxis of enchantment. The Indian novel was part of a larger phenomenon in which the enchanted worldview became the grounds for independence from England whose disenchanted ethos was understood as the underpinning and justification for its imperialism. Not surprisingly, the place—namely, Bengal—that birthed the novel also sparked India’s anti-colonial struggle and its religious revival and reform movements. The novel in particular was seen as a privileged form for preserving a spiritualized cosmology, renovating it in some ways, and using it to enable Indian sovereignty. Straddling both the British and the Indian, the worldly and the spiritual, the novel offered a unique opportunity for cultivating a modern religious sensibility. By analyzing the various literary techniques my novelists deploy to enchant a putatively disenchanted form in a (post)colonial context, I rediscover overlooked possibilities for the novel- writ-large. The trajectory I analyze teaches us that mimetic realism can offer a more congenial home to religious enchantment than the non-mimetic experimental modes, such as magical realism, usually considered more apt. My project charts the course of what I call the enchanted realist novel tradition via five seminal novels set in India and published between 1866 and 1980. In this arc, divinity is first made immanent in the phenomenal world, then it becomes internalized, only to meet with a birfurcated fate in the mid-twentieth century. The indigenous writers continue with realist first-order rendering of the divine in the daily, whereas the more international novelists formally distance themselves from the felt enchantment of the first order they struggle to represent. Another way to view that bifurcation: as the disenchanted, statist worldview comes to prevail in the national imaginary at Independence, the enchanted novel must henceforth either restrict itself to tiny local pockets of extant enchantment; or, if the novel still has ambitions to be a national allegory, it must register disenchantment as the nearly thorough- going a priori to what now can only be called a deliberate re-enchantment. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments…………………………..……………………………………………………ii Dedication……………………………………….………………………………………………..iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1……Bringing God down to earth………………….…………………………………..56 Enchanting the real in the early Indian novel: Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Kapalkundala Chapter 2…… “Oh when shall we be able to sing it?”………………………………….……..153 The poetry of the prosaic in the organic Indian lifeworld: Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World Chapter 3……“The Air was thick with religion”………………………………………………212 The difficult passage into enchantment in the last days of the Raj: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India Chapter 4….. “The feasibility of the chutnification of history?”………………………...…….342 A critique of magical realism: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Afterword……………………………………………………………………………………….385 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………....…394 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first debt is to my mentor and friend, Akeel Bilgrami, whose own work on enchantment has been the ballast on which I have built my own, and whose unflagging investment in this project and unfathomable support of me through many difficult years have enabled me to thrive. I also owe gratitude to my sponsor and friend, David Damrosch, whose abiding support throughout my career at Columbia University has gone far beyond the call of duty. As well, I would like to thank Jonathan Arac, who consistently and generously read my drafts and always offered prompt, insightful, and extremely learned feedback. Thanks also to Partha Chatterjee and Sarah Cole, my outside readers who offered insider wisdom from their fields of expertise. I owe Anand Vivek Taneja and Nandini Sikand special thanks for their years of encouragement and insight as we convened monthly our informal dissertation writing group. I would also like to thank the professors who taught me at Harvard and Columbia. In particular, I honor the memory of my late advisor Edward Said whose path-breaking work inspired me to study postcolonial literature in the first place, who taught me to read and write with the right disposition, and whose intellectual ferocity and generosity remain an example to me. Without my kindred colleagues Andrea Andersson and Jenelle Troxell, I would have had much less delight during my graduate school career. But my largest share of gratitude goes to my family, to whom I owe too much to account. The steady and profound support of Jennifer Gootman, Madhuri Gogineni, and my parents Aruna and Rao Gogineni to whom this dissertation is dedicated, have sustained me and my work for many years. Finally, I have been blessed with ii the extraordinary companionship of Kyle Nichols whose unstinting emotional support and round-the-clock, multifarious, and utterly competent help during the final stage of this dissertation enabled it to come to completion. iii For my parents, who gave me an enchanted India iv 1 INTRODUCTION If religion is essentially of the inner life, it follows that it can be truly grasped only from within…There is but too much danger that the non-believer will talk of religion as a blind man might of colours, or one totally devoid of ear, of a beautiful musical composition. Wilhelm Schmidt, quoted by E. E. Evans-Pritchard How, in a non-Western religious context, does God enter into a secular Western artistic form, and to what effect? Approaching this question requires entering into a religious attitude in which the divine presence courses through daily secular life. With its sharp divisions between worldly/otherworldly, science/faith, rational/irrational, the Enlightenment legacy has made it difficult for non-believers to grasp the inner life of believers, for whom those divisions do not necessarily obtain with the same force. However, in two simple ways, fiction can potentially overcome the estrangement between believers and non-believers: first, by translating alternate worldviews from the inside out; second, by operating through a suspension of disbelief homologous to faith itself. Yet, when it comes to religion, literary critics have tended to dismiss fiction’s imaginative invitation, instead following in the secular-critical tradition that turns a blind eye to the believer’s sensibility and reads religion as mere symptom of sociological and historical issues. This intellectual proclivity for transcendent rather than immanent critique has only widened the chasm between secular intellectuals and their increasingly religious surround. If there is a single figure to whom the secular-critical approach to the novel can be attributed, it is Georg Lukács, whose foundational Theory of the Novel (1920) serves as the touchstone of my dissertation. “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by 2 God,”1 claimed Lukács, putting forth a notion of the novel that has since passed into common sense in both lay and academic circles. Lukács’ disenchantment of the novel went hand-in-hand with Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world,” a sociological theory that observes rationalization, materialism, science, humanism and secularism displacing otherworldiness, organicity, and Divine immanence, turning the anima mundi into a mechanistic deus absconditus modern world. What if Lukács had expanded his purview beyond a desacralized Europe to consider novels set in colonial and postcolonial realities where divinity courses through daily life, and provisionally enchanted worldviews persist? World Literature’s expansion of the literary horizon beyond Europe has invited me to reconsider whether the novel need be considered disenchanted by definition. If the novel—especially the realist novel—has been generally understood as a disenchanted