A scholar as teacher, thinker

Few distinguished scholars are honoured with a festschrift, and fewer still are celebrated through a volume that truly reflects the range of their intellectual acumen and academic legacy. This festschrift — edited by Madhumita Chakraborty, Anuradha Ghosh and Mukesh Ranjan — more than fulfils both its purpose and promise. It celebrates Prof Harish Narang’s creative and interdisciplinary contributions, with emphasis on his engagements with postcolonial literature, translation studies and cultural theory.

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This collection, meticulously curated by Prof Narang’s colleagues, friends, former students and admirers, pays a tribute to his long and illustrious tenure as Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Engaging with the discourses of language, literature, culture and cinema, the book represents a veritable spectrum of subjects and themes with both critical insight and comparative perspective.

The essays cover an array of topics, including Indian languages, literatures and their translations into English, African literature in English, diasporic writing, marginal literatures, popular culture, folk traditions, intersections of literature with other arts and questions of ethics across caste, class, gender and ethnicity. Comprising 33 chapters, the book mirrors the varied intellectual interests, critical thinking, ethical concerns, and socially-committed scholarship that Prof Narang fostered.

The opening section explores Punjabi poets such as Pash, Dil and Batalvi, Abdul Ahad Azad and Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor in Kashmiri literature, along with the fictional writings of Premchand, Manto and Doodhnath Singh.

The second section looks into the customs and traditions of India’s tribal and minority groups; the third examines the genres, modes and media emergent in contemporary times, alongside the increasing impact of technology. While the fourth section is devoted to the writings of MG Vassanji, a Canadian author of African-Asian heritage, the fifth maps out the interconnection among African, Indian and Afro-American literatures through a gendered perspective.

The sixth section continues this transnational focus, engaging with writers from diverse parts of Africa. The seventh turns to Prof Narang’s own writings and translations — underscoring the creative, critical and translative aspects of his intellection, and offering extraordinary insights into his credo and enduring personal and aesthetico-political commitments. Then there are his meditations on creative writings and ethics, tracing the arc of his illustrious intellectual and pedagogical journey. The final section maps out the complex connections between language and literature.

The volume also includes a foreword by Padma Bhushan awardee Prof Kapil Kapoor, and an afterword by Prof Vaishna Narang, Prof Narang’s wife, herself an academic. It is a fitting tribute to an erudite scholar and serves as an invaluable resource for readers interested in the promise of inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary approaches to the study of language, literature, culture and cinema.

— The reviewer is professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia (Central) University