Postcolonial Text, Vol 10, No 3 & 4 (2015) Translated Worlds: Passages, Journeys, and Returns1 Chandrima Chakraborty, Guest Editor McMaster University, Canada Anupama Mohan Presidency University, Kolkata, India I Passages Our introduction takes its title from Chelva Kanaganayakam’s unpublished essay, “Passages, Journeys, and Returns: A Poetics for South Asian Travel Writing,” that was presented first as a talk at the University of Delhi in 2007. In it, Chelva makes an interesting move that only a scholar with his special expertise could; he argues: In general terms, it has been maintained that the genre of travel writing belongs largely to the West, although the notion of a journey is equally prevalent elsewhere. ... Certainly literary histories in India do not often draw attention to this genre, and while there is considerable evidence to the constant movement with India and to neighbouring lands, the genre itself has not flourished. At the same time, it is possible to see in the creative literature constant references to travel, both literal and mythical. The two epics—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—are themselves about travel and about exile. To shift for a moment to literary history in Tamil, there is evidence, even in the earliest Cankam poetry (circa 1 – 3 CE), of the need to move to other landscapes, and the anguish associated with such movements ... (3) For those aware of Chelva’s erudition, the three-pronged move he makes in this passage—from western/ized modes of travel writing whose impact can be seen on postcolonial diasporic writing, to older modes of travel tales such as those found in the two great Hindu epics, to the ways in which travel as a concept animates a different body of ancient writing, Tamil Cankam poetry—directs us to the temporal and spatial sweeps that mark the best of Chelva’s writings. As a Professor of postcolonial literatures at the University of Toronto, Chelva shaped his pedagogy around the courses he taught in world Anglophone literatures: survey courses in postcolonial studies, and at the graduate levels, where there was more latitude, specialized courses in South Asian studies, Sri Lankan literature, and the interrelationship of myth and literature in postcolonial writings, among others. What made Chelva’s course offerings distinctive was the manner in which students were introduced to new and old texts in complex ways, and to a panoply of names, exciting and unfamiliar: Rienzi Crusz (Canadian/Sri Lankan Burgher), Zulfikar Ghose (Canadian/Pakistani), Suniti Namjoshi (Canadian/Indian), Manil Suri (American/Indian), Ernest Macintyre (Sri Lankan), R. Cheran (Canadian/Sri Lankan), and A. Sivanandan (Sri Lankan/British), among many others. In these courses, students were also reintroduced in novel ways to canonical writers such as R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, and Attia Hossein, to name a few. “Postcolonialism” courses often end up taking a sampler approach in Western academic settings but Chelva’s syllabi produced inventive and creative interrelationships between the canonical and the new, enabling his students to forge a nuanced understanding of South Asian literatures. This kind of pedagogy both enabled and was, in its own turn, impelled by his wide- ranging scholarship and his deep interest in classical traditions of the narrative and the poetic. Chelva’s first book, Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose, emerged from his doctoral work at the University of British Columbia (1981–85) and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1993. More monographs followed in subsequent years: Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and their World (TSAR, 1995), Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (TSAR, 1997), Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2002), and Nedunalvadai: A Collection of Essays in Tamil (Kalachuvadu, 2010). In these years, Chelva also edited several books, which included the much-acclaimed Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (TSAR, 2001), Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature (TSAR, 2005), and Arbiters of a National Imaginary: Essays on Sri Lanka (International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, 2008), Uprooting the Pumpkin Selections from Sri Lankan Tamil Literature, 1950-2012 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), among others. At the time of his death, Chelva was working on an ambitious project, A Literary History of South Asian Writing, contracted with Cambridge University Press, and one can only hope that the manuscript will some day soon be published. Numerous articles in various national and international peer-reviewed journals as well as several conference papers, plenary and keynote addresses delivered at international universities and seminars reflected and cemented Chelva’s place in South Asian studies as a leading thinker of the field. His Directorship of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk Centre of the University of Toronto also allowed Chelva to strengthen the University’s ties with other agencies and institutes for the promotion of South Asian literatures and arts. As a scholar in postcolonial studies, Chelva constantly tested the limits of the field: through the exploration of such concepts as counter- realism, the pastoral, and utopia, Chelva’s work examined those numerous ways in which the field itself battles the paradoxes that emerge from colonial legacy, Eurocentric theorizing, and global diversity. The many disjunctions between a life in Colombo and one in Toronto provided Chelva with an abiding interest in the rural as a category of thought. Such ex-centric foci actualized much of his postcolonial work where he could, with lucidity and vision, claim, as he did in his book Counterrealism, that a literary history of the Indian subcontinent based on form—rather than content—could create useful and rewarding connections between more established models of 2 Postcolonial Text Vol 10, No 3 & 4 (2015) realism that were tied strongly to anticolonial politics and the newer examples of experimental writing that emerged in the post-1947 period. To claim two distinctive traditions, Chelva argues, “is not to endorse that writers always belonged to one or the other, or that these were mutually exclusive...” (15). By drawing on West Indian critic Wilson Harris’ idea of “novels of consolidation”, Chelva suggests that the paradoxes between realism and experimentalism, English and vernacular writers, and “ancient” and “modern” are what make the literary mode so dynamic, immediate, and relevant. Chelva reminds us that no understanding of subcontinental literary history would be complete without a nuanced examination of the multiple sources from which Indian and other literatures have drawn from Western literatures in general. In all his work, Chelva insisted on the uniqueness and indigeneity of the Indo-Anglian tradition (choosing a deliberately older way of referring to Indian writing in English) but his critical interest remained in seeing those interlocking moments of contact within and without, through which one could explore such concepts as syncretism, synthesis, and multiplicity. For postcolonial studies, Chelva’s research, over many decades, provided crucial readings of Sri Lankan literatures that served as correctives to the general bias in the field in favour of Anglophone and Indian literatures. Although Chelva wrote widely on Indian literatures, his contributions on Sri Lankan writings helped create within Canada a platform for Sri Lankan literature in general and Tamil literary traditions in particular. As a translator of Tamil poetry, Chelva showed great facility with vernacular traditions in the subcontinent, making him a truly versatile interdisciplinary scholar—and this, long before multidisciplinarity or interdisciplinarity became rewarding official projects in Canadian academia. The strong presence of the Sri Lankan diaspora in Canada, especially during the turbulent years of the rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka and the increasingly violent war of attrition with the Government of Sri Lanka, remains an important social context to understand the value of Chelva’s translations of Tamil poetry (both ancient and modern) and his Directorship of the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) in Toronto. In an obituary published in November 2014 in The Island, the Sri Lankan national daily, Anupama Mohan describes Chelva’s work in the first decade of this century, when the offensive against the LTTE was at its peak in Sri Lanka and Tamil diasporas across the world were being mobilized in overt and covert ways to support the cause back home, as exemplifying the best in the tradition of the parrhesiastes. It is an insight that is underscored by the kind of work Chelva did between 1995 and 2005 where, through his translations of Tamil poetry, as well as the many scholarly and extra-mural projects that he supported as Director of CSAS, he showed his commitment to dialogue and understanding. He was a founding member in 2001 of the Tamil Literary Garden, a non- profit organization committed to the promotion of studies and literary activities in Tamil, both nationally and internationally, and a founding member in 2006 of the annual Toronto Tamil Studies Conference at 3 Postcolonial Text Vol 10, No 3 & 4 (2015) the University of Toronto, now the largest conference of its kind in North America. Under his aegis, the University of Toronto awarded the Acharya Sushil Kumar International Peace Prize