Born and educated in Kerala, E.V. Ramakrishnan teaches English at South Gujarat University, Surat. He was a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study during 1993. His recent publication is a volume of poems in English, A Python in a Snake Park (1994). His collection of essays in criticism in Malayalam, Aksharavum Adhunikathayum (1993) was chosen as the best critical work of the year by Kerala Sahitya Samithi.
This book is an attempt to evaluate the social relevance of modernist poetry in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi. The significance of the modernist moment has not disappeared from the literary scene in Indian languages. The author argues that modernism in Indian poetry has not been a monolithic movement. He makes a distinction between the conflicting ideological practices of the metropolitan idiom of the High Modernist mode and the radical tone of the avant-garde writers. In the first full-length comparative study of modernism in the poetry of three significant Indian literary traditions, one of the most turbulent and productive periods of Indian literary history is mapped through a close reading of its seminal cultural texts.
Of late there has been greater interest in literatures produced in the regional languages of India. This is largely due to the increasing number of translations becoming available. It may also have something to do with the current interest in the West in non-Western 'ethnic' literatures. However, if regional literatures from India are fed into pre-fabricated canon manufactured in metropolitan countries and universities they may merely serve as illustrations of theories that have no relevance to the actual conditions in which they are produced. The present study is an attempt to read the poetry written during the modernist phase in three Indian languages in a comparative Indian context. It is hoped that it will contribute towards informed reading of ems from these languages in English translation.
Poems I was in my late teens when the modernist movement in Malayalam caught the imagination of a younger generation of readers. I still remember the excitement with which some of us followed each instalment of O.V. Vijayan's Khasakkinte Ithihasam (The Legends of Khasack) as it was being serialised in a major literary journal. The modernist moment passed, and as such moments always do, it left behind a debris of images and metaphors which in course of time became faint echoes, like fragments of dreams and landscapes remembered from a long journey across an alien continent. In writing this study I have' revisited those years and critically examined the contours of anxieties and aspirations which informed the impressions left behind by an earlier involvement. Now I can see the modernist moment as one of the several such points of transition that make up the history of literature in a language. Perhaps in all criticism there is an element of autobiography.
I was enabled to take up this study by a grant by the University Grants Commission under its Career Award Scheme during 1988-89.1 am thankful to the U.G.C. for funding the project. I thank the South Gujarat University for permitting me to devote time to the project. A short-term Fellowship from the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Shimla in 1992 gave me an opportunity to organize the materials I had collected into the present form. I am grateful to the Institute for bringing out this book. It is impossible to name all the individuals I have consulted in the course of the study during the last four years. My deep gratitude is due to Professor Anjana Desai who took an active interest in my project and extended valuable help whenever necessary. I have greatly benefited from my discussions with Dr. G.N. Devy, Professor K. Sachidanandan, Professor Ayyappa Paniker, Professor Ashok R. Kelkar, Shri Dilip Chitre, Professor Kedarnath Singh, Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, Professor Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Professor Digish Mehta, Shri K.G. Sankara Pillai, Dr. P.P. Raveendran, Dr. Aniket Jaaware, Professor Chandrasekhar Jahagirdar and Dr. Jaidev. Dr. Chandrakant Patil, Professor M.M. Sayanekar and Dr. R.J. Bhongle rendered valuable help in various matters related to Marathi poetry. K.M. Sherrif and A.J. Thomas have helped me in translation work. Ms Hetal Mody, as a Research Investigator, assisted me both in compiling information andb translation.
I also thank my wife and children for their cooperation which has sustained me through difficult periods during the writing of this book. Some parts of the book have appeared in other places. In December
1991, the Centre for Social Studies in Surat brought out an occasional paper titled "From Myth to History: The Trajectory of Modernism in the Poetry of Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati and Hindi from the 1950s to the 1970s" which contained materials presented here in Chapters 2 and 3. An earlier version of the chapter on the poetry of Kedarnath Singh was presented as a paper at the Seminar on "Social Awareness in Indian Literature" organized by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Shimla. Subsequently it was included in the volume of papers based on the Seminar. The chapter on the poetry of Muktibodh appeared as an article in New Quest, No. 87 (May-June 1991). Abridged versions of my interviews with Chitre, Kedarnath Singh and Sachidanandan appeared in The Bombay Literary Review (1990, Number 2), Indian Literature, No. 153 (Jan-Feb. 1993), and the Sunday Review of The Times of India (1 December, 1991) respectively. An earlier version of my chapter on the poetry of Chitre appeared in Kakatiya Journal of English Studies, Vol. XII (1992). I am extremely grateful to the Director of the Centre for Social Studies and the editors of the above-mentioned journals for their permission to reprint the material.
A companion volume of translations of poems from Malayalam. Marathi and Hindi is under preparation. Hopefully, it will be published by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla in the near future.
In this study of modernism in the poetry of three Indian languages namely Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi, I have attempted to trace the trajectory of the movement and distinguish between its dominant strains. Besides, I have also attempted to describe the kind of poetry produced by some of the representative modernist poets in these languages. I am more concerned with the parallels and divergences in the literatures of these Indian languages during their modernist phases than with the correspondences between Western modernism and its Indian counterpart. It is pertinent to remember that by the 1950s modernism in the West "had lost its anti-bourgeois stance, and achieved comfortable integration into the new International capitalism." The term 'modernism' is rarely applied to contemporary writing in Indian languages these days, but the relevance of the modernist moment has not disappeared from the Indian scene. However insignificant the modernist shift may appear in the long run, its liberating influence has revised the prevailing norms of reading and writing poetry. All the languages under study have their separate literary traditions and histories and their literary movements have been shaped more by the dynamics of their specific socio-political contexts than by external influences. The nature of these socio-political contexts and their bearing on culture will be examined in the course of the opening chapter.
A note on the word 'Indian' may be in order at the very outset. A certain homogenizing impulse is inherent in positing a category called 'Indian Literature' because the term makes its appearance in literary discourse around the time India came to be perceived and imagined as a nation. It was during the colonial period that India came to be projected as a nation, as a collective super-organism with its separate history and destiny. This cultural projection of India as a nation involved a study of India's past, particularly its literary writings that extended back to the Vedic period. 'Indian Literature' as a category, at its inception, is an orientalist or Indological construct. Since this view of Indian literature is grounded in the textual metaphysics of a predominantly spiritual tradition, it excludes some of the significant
forms of literature obtaining in Indian languages. Further, 'Indian' as a category in politics or literature is posited against 'foreign". Writers from Nigeria or Tanzania use the terms "African in the place of tribal or national designations when they intend to juxtapose the countries in the continent with countries in other parts of the world. Similarly, the term "Indian" tends to imply the values which argue for the cultural unity of India as a whole. The use of English to write about literatures in Indian languages seems to reinforce such a global view. However, in this study, my aims are more modest. The comparatist method employed here does not subscribe to a view of India as a civilizational unity because it is a critique from within and an attempt to evaluate the social relevance of some trends in the poetry of Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi to the problems of living in contemporary India. A poet's subversive role in his own literary context is part of the creative struggle within the community to evolve alternative vocabularies of experiences. The framework of grand narratives of history cannot accommodate the subversive function of the new trends in literature unless they become domesticated and canonized. The levelling effect of history and the domestication implicit in canonicity finally fossilize authors and works, leaving no trace of their relevance to our present. We also have to recognize the fact that the gap between the national and the regional has been problematised by the post-colonial vocabularies of identity and difference, and centrality and plurality. The larger social context of this study is the realm of contested, competing identities in the post-Independence period, the fine print of which can only be deciphered with reference to the political subtexts inscribed in the cultural texts of the period.
More recently, a few attempts have been made to compose histories of separate literature traditions in India, the most notable being the volumes edited by K.M. George titled Comparative Indian Literature. The gap between the regional and the national is left unbridged in these two volumes mainly because Indian literature is seen as an aggregate of the separate entities called regional literatures. Sisir Kumar Das in his A History of Indian Literature (Volume 8) overcomes some of these limitations by locating the points of convergence and parallels on a civilizational terrain of labyrinthine complexity. One tends to agree with his view that a history of Indian literature is a history of "the total literary activity of the Indian people, an account of all literary traditions, great and little, their ramifications and changes, their recessions and revivals, dominance and decline." But the unifying thrust of this idealized view is largely 'an effect of geography and the nation-state.' Since a literary text that is produced in an Indian language fulfils a certain historical function in the context of the community, its meaning essentially lies in its specificity. In abstracting every significant literary text in an Indian language into the realm of a national literary history, its relation to the social context of its inception is distorted or altogether forgotten. For instance, though Kumaran Asan in Malayalam or Keshavsut in Marathi are described as Romantic poets, their contributions towards radicalising the poetic idiom of their languages cannot be grasped from any of the histories of Indian literature available in English.
In his introductory comments to the section on modern poetry in Comparative Indian Literature, V.K. Gokak has this to say on the modernist trends in Indian languages:
Poetry was composed in overlapping layers., progressive poetry growing side by side with romantic and modernist or experimental poetry with progressive. Nevertheless it is true to say that by and large 'modernist' poetry 'flourished' in the fifties and sixties of this century just as progressive poetry developed self-awareness in the forties.6
Several questions regarding chronology and terminology (not to mention ideology) are raised by this account. These are discussed at length in the first chapter of the book. Our views of modernism have been largely shaped by the Anglo-American critics who prefer to brush aside the relation between politics and culture. Their commentaries endeavour to unify modernism's pluralistic tendencies as a set of abstract codes that operate in a multi-national context. Themes such as the culture of the metropolis, the decline of the West, making it new and the exiled artist in search of a new language figure prominently in the Anglo-American discourse on the subject. The narrative of dislocation, estrangement and the self-reflexive text is woven around the heroic vision of an art without frontiers moving between. transnational capitals such as Vienna, Paris, London, New York and Berlin. Such a Western narrative has no relevance to the sociopolitical reality that informs the modernist text in Indian poetry. It is true that this extraterritorial version of modernism inspired by the Anglo-American model got anchored in the native tradition of High Textuality which looked back to pan-Indian systems of classical learning. An uprooted cosmopolitanism which looks overseas for techniques of writing and harks back to Sanskrit poetics for their legitimation dates back to the period of Romanticism.
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