From Canon to COVID: Transforming English Literary Studies in India (Essays in Honour of GJV Prasad), Edited by Angelie Multani, Albeena Shakil, Arjun Ghosh, Nandini Saha, and Swati Pal (Routledge India, 2024)
Niels Bohr is believed to have believed that ‘if quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.’ To paraphrase Bohr—away from his context—if someone seems to have entirely understood what is happening in an English Studies curriculum in India, it is indeed a matter of profound shock.
From Canon to COVID: Transforming English Literary Studies in India is an ambitious festschrift that attempts to honor the career of Professor (Dr.) G.J.V. Prasad. Edited by Angelie Multani, Albeena Shakil, Arjun Ghosh, Nandini Saha, and Swati Pal, the book is an act of love that the larger academy might feel richer for sharing. Prasad is an eminent poet, author, and scholar. He has been a champion of translation- and drama-studies. Reportedly, people, who have known him as their professor, recall his excitement over John Osborne’s postwar kitchen-sink drama, Look Back in Anger (1956), and its Indian (and Bengali adaptations). Some also report his having introduced them to a ‘golden age’ in Indian translation studies spearheaded by Professor Purushottam Lal and his legendary Writer’s Workshop. Prasad taught English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he shaped generations of intellects. Published in 2024, three years after the global pandemic can be said to have officially ceased, the aforementioned festschrift dedicated to his intellectual service deploys the moment of the crisis as a lens on the discipline of English Studies in India and beyond.
Very few recognize—if at all they indeed know—that the discipline of English Studies was virtually conceived of in nineteenth-century India, after Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835), which officiated English-medium education in Indian academic institutions; it brought forth the need to create a curriculum that was purged of scriptural and classical elements from Sanskrit and Arabic—and even Biblical literature—while trying to concoct a syllabus based on the Elizabethans and Romantics. English Studies then became yet another export from India to the colonial world—including Britain and America—like short-staple cotton and opium. But more, soon—as they say!
From Canon to Covid creates an occasion to reconsider that history, the transformations in English Studies curricula in postcolonial and twenty-first-century India, and to situate the discipline as a political and contested terrain, that has come to embrace discourses of multilingualism, bhasha literatures, intersectionality, gender, caste, tribe, diaspora, pedagogy, cultural theory, performance studies, and solidarity with the Global South. The title may signal that Covid has led to a rupturing of the ‘Canon.’ But the frankness of this collection is worth praising for its lack of any overt political partisanship.
As Tabish Khair—one of the authors in this collection—reminds us, literary experience is itself a disruptor of politicized compartmentalization of texts. Nonetheless, From Canon to Covid enjoys a solid compartmentalization, with seventeen essays divided into five sub-themed sections, spanning literary studies in India, drama, poetry, translation and transcreation, and fiction and language. The structure can be said to reflect Prasad’s vision for English Studies in India as a diversifiable receptacle for indigenous forms and expressions, and the nation’s complex sociocultural and linguistic milieus.
The introduction does a fine job of providing a historical survey of English Studies in India, the rise of bhasha debates that shaped English in India, the broadening of ‘Brit-Lit’ lenses to include complex social forces—underpinned by education policies, language politics, caste- and class-dynamics—that have governed syllabi and canons, especially since the 1980s, and more so since the ‘liberalization’ of the 1990s. At the risk of the charge of selectivity, this reviewer cannot help but present some sort of overview of some of the essays in this volume, that draw one in by the sheer value of the fascinating themes they explore.
Meena T. Pillai’s framing of Covid as a global health event and an ideological landscape of renewed colonial rhetoric offers a sharp intervention—albeit a descriptive one. It renders more visible to us how Covid has unleashed a new regime where Foucauldian biopolitics is perhaps more at play than ‘ever before.’ Therefore, the ‘post in the postcolonial’ risks remaining suspended inasmuch as once-colonized nations have brought out biometrically schemed policies on an unprecedented scale to reinforce colonial modes governance—especially when read in the light of the history of plagues and epidemics in nineteenth-century colonial India. Though Pillai does not say so, one of the historians she quotes at some length—David Arnold—who has done some impressive work on the histories of poisons, toxicology, and epidemics, once arrived at the striking conclusion that rumours became a species of anticolonial ideologies in South Asia. In the same vein, this reviewer was also reminded of a meeting Shapurji Saklatvala had with Mancherji Bhownaggree (the second and third Indian-origin Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, respectively) at Soho, where the former famously shocked the latter by proposing that the British in Bombay be exterminated by poisoning their water supplies. This is not a digression. Clearly, the Empire has thought and written back for some time, now. Pillai cautions us how imperialism is striking back. But writers and readers are not dispossessed of agency, however, for literature cannot permit life to be so bleak and passive.
For, as Mala Pandurang valuably theorizes, in her institutional history of curricular exchange, the mutation from ‘Commonwealth’-oriented frames towards a Global-South-orientation in English Studies does outflank hegemonical afterlives. Accordingly, syllabi and scholarly networks are continually in flux. What was previously a geographical and historical contingency—as far as the Commonwealth was seen—has turned into an ideological faction of resistance covering a patchwork of discourses beyond classical categories; it emphatically includes spaces—largely from Africa, South Asia, South America—and experiences left out after histories of ‘contemporary capitalist globalization’ have been written.
Far from the madding crowd of intelligent theories and pathbreaking paradigm shifts, as it were, the late Keki N. Daruwalla’s essay on poetry and the forms it takes during melancholia, distress, anguish, suffering, and survival represents the bizarre stoicism of a voice whose person and world are evidently going through indescribable and undiminished vengeance—at a time when no gods intervene. Daruwalla is oddly frank. To him, poets are neither obedient towards rules nor intelligent about the business of social activism. They are at best ‘pinchers’ from novelists. This is not to be taken literally. Daruwalla wrote and published literature for as long as human average lifespans are known to last. This reviewer read his stories in school curricula about twenty-five years ago. Daruwalla’s body of work could not have been established without extraordinary discipline and commitment. Rather, the purpose, if any, that his essay embodies in this volume is that of a Miltonic sonnet, ‘On His Blindness’—that he does not name but his words are steeped in—‘they also serve who stand and wait.’ Not all in this world rebel and resist. English Studies is also a bastion for those who have made themselves vulnerable to experiences and, yet, they survive. To resist the temptation to rebel against those who have rebelled against our unselfish and arduous labours is among the oldest forms of resistance.
One will also find in this volume an essay by Prasad’s former colleague, Santosh K. Sareen, whose essay on Australian indigenous writings and history is in line with his pedagogical commitments at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he taught Australian Literature, among other courses, for several years. B. Mangalam’s essay on ‘performing the Dalit’ offers an excellent study of how Dalit theatre has facilitated a mutually co-creative space for dialogues between Dalit and ‘savarna’ citizens. It deserves being read both on its own merit as well as for the currency of its theme in contemporary English Studies curricula across Indian universities. Prasad’s another colleague, Udaya Kumar’s essay purportedly begins discussing the ideas of the renowned Malayali spiritual philosopher, Sree Narayana Guru. It goes on to delve into, and rightly so, an aspect that used to be neglected once upon a time in this trade, and that is caste and mnemonic traditions. Here, translation is revealed to be not a neutral event but loaded with repressive, regressive, and transformative potential. Kumar’s essay may look dense but is rewarding. A subsequent essay by C.S. Lakshmi (Ambai) on what seems like a similar theme—translation—is characterized by its unadorned directness. She warns us that ‘hundred-percent’ translations are impossible. To Ambai, translation is almost corporeal. It is akin to a ‘touch.’ But it can never transcend—or should it be translated as ‘transgress’ (?) depending upon the regime one is translating for—into an ‘embrace.’ Nevertheless, translation as she says, and as her most well-recognized translator in recent times, Prasad, might agree—is ‘an equal music’ (Ambai took that phrase from Vikram Seth’s eponymous novel, which took it from the English poet and clergyman, John Donne; perhaps, Daruwalla would have chuckled twice!).
The essay by K.B. Veio Pou and Achingliu Kamei describes the emergence of writings from northeastern India and how they point to themes—ecology, indigeneity, cosmology, cultural heterogeneity, effects of modernization, contact with state institutions, and the like—that distinguish the region and its literary identity from mainstream South Asian canons. Nevertheless, the ‘northeast’ is not a homogeneous space, and urges for premature ‘canonization’ of its literature, therefore, should deal with the region’s internal diversity and local traditions. Interestingly, the authors end with a reference to the notion that literature from the ‘northeast’ has been seen as having latent affinities with literary themes from South China. This somewhat unclassifiable note also stamps Meenakshi Bharat’s essay on Kashmiri literature, a typology often read for its representations of dichotomy between the state’s ‘distinctive identity’ and the lived experiences of people, on the one hand, and their relationship with the Indian state, on the other. These essays solicit patient perusal and detailed unpacking lest they be reductively read as centering narratives of non-nativity, disenfranchisement, and grief as the key concerns of the literatures they seek to explore.
Khair’s remarkable defense of imaginative, close reading—in this case of Henry James—comes in handy here. English Studies, he reminds us, is not about purely politicized readings. Literature is not identical, he argues, to anything but itself. It is not accomplishment. It is not medicine. It is not history. It is not classics. It is not administration. It is not demagoguery. It is none of those things that have unfortunately enabled it to be read as ‘everything but literature.’ It is only—and this ‘only’ in no way undermines what it is but singularizes it as—a ‘distinctive’ way of thinking. There is no reason that literature should be read as anything but literary. Khair inspires thinking—at least, as far as this reviewer’s quixotic literary flight went—towards what may be provisionally called a school of public reason, something that the Indian academia might consider steering, this time not for commodity-exports driven by a colonial structure but self-determined agency. But perhaps this reviewer is only dreaming aloud, and perhaps this should not be read as anything else but a little dream rounded with a sleep … to bowdlerize William Shakespeare.
Be that as it may, seasoned faculty from English departments to graduate students to interested generalists will find much to admire and debate in this volume. The anthology’s generosity of insight (and its questions) ensures that scholars, teachers, creators, and policy-makers will return to it when charting the future of Indian literature. This reviewer recommends that this book—and books such as this due in the future by authors and scholars affiliated to this volume—be enjoyed as representations of a canon that is at once collapsing and amplifying. ‘How wonderful that we have met with a paradox!’ one might exclaim in the spirit of Bohr. ‘Now we have some hope of making progress.’
Meanwhile, the warmth of Professor (Dr.) G.J.V. Prasad and the copious rounds of tea (and intellection) he has sponsored for his students will surely be remembered through books like this and the literary lives of students who have known him for four decades and more.
Arup K. Chatterjee 