Sunday, December 9, 2001		Books

Literature and Nation:Britain and India 1800-1990 edited
by Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi. Routledge in association with The Open University, London. Pages 400.

NATIONALISM is a subject of ongoing interest, more so since Elie Kedourie traced its relationship to culture in the 19th seventies, making it the most powerful political force constituting a major historical form of an identifiable cultural politics. Its associations exist with issues that have nothing to do with the nation-state (the most obvious example being religion, and the most trivial, cricket), yet it will certainly survive the replacement of the nation-state by any other form of political association — if that should occur.. As a subject of cultural studies, it is both loved and hated, deemed progressive as well as regressive.

It is not surprising that in recent years some of the most widely read and debated volumes have been published about the rise of nations. "Literature and Nation" is about the literary dimension of nationalist ideology, having relevance to both Britain and India, an analysis of major texts written in Britain and India from 1800 to 1990.

The first part of the book examines canonical texts from Jane Austen’s "Mansfield Park" to Salman Rushdie’s "Midnight’s Children". The usual "Kim", "A Passage to India" and "Kanthapura" are all here. The second part contains a selection of literary texts and historical documents pertinent to colonial and nationalist history, helpfully collected by the editors. The intention behind the individual analyses of a series of texts in the first part is to play up the particularity of the author and text against the generalisations one is wont to make in genericising both literature and the nation, especially since these are texts most frequently picked up by students of post-colonial literature.

The ways to circumvent orthodox reading of texts is given in
detail by Richard Allen as he defines "nation", "nationalism", "cultural identity", "literature", "colonialism and post-colonialism", all of which are attempts to problematise conventional ways of understanding these terms. By helpfully citing names of authors and books, he would like to make sure that the unwary reader first understands the way British hegemonic strategies tutored the natives into confounding nature/culture tropes. As a guiding principle, Allen cites Stuart Hall’s redoubtable essay, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" at the outset to distinguish essentialistic identity from a more fluid, shifting and changing one. He describes in great detail how he dealt with the "grand and weighty" word "aporia" that Hall uses in this essay. As one reads further, moving to the analysis of the complex language used by Gayatri Spivak, the realisation grows strong that this is indeed a fine essay for new learners.

Part of this enterprise is the endeavour to give a step-by-step introduction to the making of British India. The year 1757 in which the Battle of Plassey was fought, which made the British dig their heels in Bengal by protecting Mir Jaffar; 1818 which virtually completed their dominion; 1783 when with the appointment of Sir William Jones as the judge of the Supreme Court in Bengal, the British advanced their cultural hegemony. Then followed the infamous controversies between Orientalism and Anglicism where, by the beginning of the 19th century, the latter was being rapidly advocated at the cost of the former, as has been argued lucidly by Gauri Viswanathan in "Masks of Conquest". This tug-of-war was to culminate with Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education, arguably the most quoted statement in the colonial history of India, in the formation of Britain’s "imperishable empire".

"Literature and Nation" takes the two aspects of its title to be cultural repositories in the context of both Britain and India. Indeed, it could not be otherwise. Of course, Britain, like America today, thought it was its "divine right" to rule the world using culture as its primary tool. As William Blake has written: "The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa." The trajectory of the 19th century novel has precisely such an intention. I am not implying that creative writing consciously planned such a move to make Europeans go out and colonise the world but, as Edward Said has argued in "Culture and Imperialism", imperialism is sustained by art, and novel writing and empire building are inconceivable without each other. Art forms have to inevitably carry the burden of "ideological state apparatuses".

The chapters on "Mansfield Park" (1815) which may be read alongside the dynamics of keeping slaves in Antigua and "A Tale of Two Cities" within the context of the uprising of 1857 follow such a pattern. The early 20th century "Kim" and "A Passage to India"are also shown to represent how "people live everyday life in the modern nation in discourses which are quintessentially embodied in the realist novel".

Harish Trivedi has made two individual contributions: Raja Rao’s "Kanthapura" which indeed is the most well recognised representation of Indiannationalism in literature until perhaps Rushdie’s "Midnight’s Children". After a biographical sketch of Rao and his first novel, Trivedi mentions that two book-length studies exist on Rao: one, M. K. Naik’s and the other, mine – "Myths of the Nation". Although he says that the two work on different ends, it may be mentioned that Naik’s book is an introductory reader with separate chapters on each of Rao’s writings. On the other hand, "Myths of the Nation" is a different project: it presents the argument that unstated and probably subliminal political ideologies underlie nationalist representations. It relates literature to history and politics of the Indian freedom struggle to raise questions about the nature of history-writing and its approximation to the writing of fictions in
nationalist accounts. While it may be a case study of "Kanthapura", the novel itself is incidental to the argument of the book which has larger concerns.

And as for the central concerns, Trivedi says that the method adopted was merely "politically correct" as the novel had been scrutinized "against the grain", especially when the claim is made that women, Muslims and peasants were marginalised in the making of the nation. As is clear from the argument of my book, the fictional account of "Kanthapura" is no exception. Trivedi believes that the Muslim policeman in the novel is regarded as a villain because he is a policeman and not because he is not a Hindu as I do. He might
consider Chapter 2 of the novel which begins with: "To tell you the truth, Bade Khan did not stay in "Kanthapura". Being a Mohomedan he could stay neither in the Potters Street nor in the Sudra Street, and you don’t of course expect him to live in the Brahmin Street." Khan turns nasty only when the village outcasts him.

And yes, novels, or for that matter, any writing, should be read against the grain. How else may we read when we are no longer in a premodern state of innocence? I presume the purpose of Allen and Trivedi is to induct new readers precisely into such a reading. Is not that what all the contributors are advocating?

I may also point out that it is not I who is being politically correct but Raja Rao: he shows progressive Brahmins as well as progressive women. He has to. Most Brahmins in the novel are so enthusiastic (in spite of moments of conflicting orthodoxy) that they coexist with other castes in terms of common celebrations and communal eating to permit Rao to present a vision of a united India; although read "against the grain", the movement is seen to be largely Hinduised by ushering in discourses on Vedanta and maya vada, and references to Sankara, Brahmin gods, avatars and incarnations. How else could the observances relating to Kenchamma, the gram devata, be performed by priest Rangappa and the pontifical Brahmins, Bhatta and Ramanna?

Besides, Lingayat forms of worship are completely disregarded in a novel set in Karnataka. And as for the women, they may have been represented as "the chief satyagrahis", but does the novel give evidence of any transformation whatsoever in their position, except perhaps in a spiritual sort of way?

For that matter, does the Indian national movement give evidence of empowerment in the status of all those Indian women who contributed enormously to it? If it is a "historical fact" that the women of India "were second to none", why are we still battling patriarchal tendencies when we have it all? If we were to believe "history" and Harish Trivedi, we would assume that after the civil disobedience movement of the 1930s there
has been no need for any further liberation of women.