Poetry in the Protests -- Abu Al-Qasim Al-Shabi

[Cross-posted at Guernica] 

Protest poetry and music sometimes rises to the surface during popular uprisings, crystallizing popular sentiments -- one thinks of Victor Jara in Chile, Nazim Hikmet in Turkey, Faiz Ahmed Faiz in Pakistan, or Woody Guthrie in the United States. At times like these, the right poetry and song doesn't merely describe how people are feeling; it can actually act as an intensifier that guides a protest movement, helping it spread and solidify. (Needless to say, such poetry does not need to be written by professional poets. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream..." was an act of poetry as much as anything else.)

Along those lines, it seems worthwhile to note the role played by Arabic poetry in the uprisings. One particular poet, Abu Al-Qasim Al-Shabi (whose name can also be rendered in English as Aboul-Qasem Echebbi), was widely cited on the streets and even in the Tunisian news-media during the uprising against Ben Ali, and according to reports coming in from Aljazeera, is now being cited by protestors on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria.

The key poem is rendered in English as "To the Tyrants of the World," and unfortunately I cannot find a great translation of it online anywhere. There is one version at a blog called Arabic Literature in English, here. Interestingly, a better translation is actually available via a radio story on NPR.

To the Tyrants of the World

(Translated by Abdul Iskander for NPR)

Oppressive tyrant, lover of darkness, enemy of life

You have ridiculed the size of the weak people

Your palm is soaked with their blood

You have deformed the magic of existence

And planted the seeds of sorrow in the fields

Wait -- don't be fooled by the spring

The clearness of the sky or the light of dawn 

For on the horizon lies the horror of darkness,

Rumble of thunder, and blowing of wind

Beware, for below the ash there is fire

And he who grows thorns reaps wounds

Look there, for I have harvested the heads of mankind

And the flowers of hope 

And I have watered the heart of the earth with blood

I soaked it with tears until it was drunk

The river of blood will sweep you

And the fiery storm will devour you 

Translated by Abdul Iskander (Source. Original Arabic)

As I mentioned, "To the Tyrants of the World" was recited on the streets during the protests in Tunisia, and it is now being recited in Cairo and Alexandria by the millions who have taken to the streets to demand democratic reforms and the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. One line whose meaning comes across with unmistakable force in this translation comes near the end: "He who grows thorns will reap wounds." One does not forget a line like that.

Another poem by al-Shabi is a short verse that is actually part of the Tunisian national anthem, "If the people one day aspire to life" (also referred to variously as "The Will to Life" or "The Will to Live"). Here the Arabic Literature blog does have three very good translations available on their site here. My favorite, at least in terms of the quality of the English, is by a commenter at another site, called YankeeJohn:

Should the people one day truly aspire to life
then fate must needs respond
the night must needs shine forth
and the shackles must needs break
Those who are not embraced by life’s yearning
shall evaporate in her air and vanish.  (Source)

Again, for the original Arabic, I would suggest taking a look at the bottom of the post here. You can also see Al-Shabi's poetry being recited in Arabic in a video at the website of UT-Austin here.

Another powerful political Arab poet I know of is Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati, an Iraqi who spent much of his adult life in exile. One of his famous poems, "The Dragon," is available in translation here. Below are the opening lines of the poem (it's worth reading in full):

A dictator, hiding behind a nihilist's mask,
has killed and killed and killed,
pillaged and wasted,
but is afraid, he claims,
to kill a sparrow.
His smiling picture is everywhere:
in the coffeehouse, in the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.
Satan used to be an original,
now he is just the dictator's shadow.
The dictator has banned the solar calendar,
abolished Neruda, Marquez, and Amado,
abolished the Constitution;
he's given his name to all the squares, the open spaces,
the rivers,
and all the jails in his blighted homeland. (Source)

This is usually interpreted as the poet's commentary on Saddam Hussein, but at various points in the poem al-Bayyati expands his meaning to refer to the dictator-dragons who are being "cloned" acround the world.

There are of course many other contemporary poets from Egypt and Tunisia, and I will be looking them up in the days and weeks ahead to see if I can find more writing like al-Shabi's -- writing that seems to crystallize what is going on, even if it might have been written at a different time or in a different context. One place to look might be the collection, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from The Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. Egyptian poets included in the volume include Andree Chedid (writing in French), Amal Dunqul, Ahmad Abd al-Mu'ti Hijazi, Fatma Kandil, Abd el-Monem Ramadan, Salah 'abd al-Sabur, and Himy Salem. Some Tunisian poets whose Muhammad al-Ghuzzi, Amina Said (writing in French), and al-Munsif al-Wayhabi.

*

[UPDATE: Read this incredibly informative essay by Elliott Cola on the role of poetry in the Arab protest movements... Thanks Kitabet.]

Revisiting Ahmed Ali: Twilight in Delhi (1940)

[Note to friends: I'm doing a version of this as a talk a couple of different times in the next few weeks. Any feedback, corrections, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.] 




Ahmed Ali's career is one of the best ones I know to illustrate the connections between the style and ideology of the Progressive Writers' Movement and more experimental and lyrical modes of mid-20th century writing in India and Pakistan. Ali is best known for his English-language novel, Twilight in Delhi (first published in London by Hogarth Press in 1940), but he wrote several other novels in English, as well as a number of short stories and plays in Urdu in the 1930s. He was one of the "Angare Four" -- one of the four authors who contributed short stories to a collection called Angare in 1932, which was furiously condemned by the Indian Muslim community and banned by the British government for material deemed offensive to Muslims in particular. He was also one of the co-founders of the All-India Progressive Writers' Association AIPWA, in 1935-6. Around 1940, however, he left the movement following disagreements with its leader, his friend Sajjad Zaheer. Like many of the other major Indian Muslim intellectuals of his era, Ali had spent some time in Aligarh at the Aligarh Muslim Anglo-Oriental College (today known as Aligarh Muslim University), an English-medium college that was also known as a reformist hub. (E.M. Forster's friend Syed Ross Masood had a connection to Aligarh.)


Thanks to the Annual of Urdu Studies, we have a lot of biographical material about Ali freely available online. Start with this annotated CV. Then see Carlo Coppola's survey of Ali's literary career here. Ali went into diplomatic service right around the time of independence, and was assigned to China. After Partition he elected to make Karachi his home, and later continued to work as a diplomat and a businessman there. In the 1960s, he published a second work of literary fiction in English, Ocean of Night. In the 1980s, he published a diplomatic satire called Of Rats and Diplomats, as well as a self-translated volume of his earlier Urdu short stories from the 1930s and 40s, The Prison-House. I've looked at all three novels, but the only one I can recommend is Twilight in Delhi (the short stories are also recommended).  


In the volume that started it all, Angare, Ali has two short stories, Badal Nahi Aati (The Clouds Don't Come) and Mahavaton ki ek raat (One night in the winter rains). "The Clouds Don't Come" was translated by Tahira Naqvi for Michigan State's Journal of South Asian Literature (JSAL). As far as I know, "Mahavaton ke ek raat" has never been translated into English [I'm actually working on doing one, albeit with help.]  Indeed, as I understand it, despite its importance as a starting point for the  Progressive Writers' Movement, Angare as a whole has never been translated into English; at best we have a few selections here and there in journals like JSAL. I also can't find any evidence that it's ever been republished in India since it was banned by the British in 1933; the only re-publication I know of is an Urdu edition published in England around 1988. (That is, needless to say, the version I myself am looking at; the original, banned Angare is nowhere to be found.) 

[UPDATE: There are now not one, but two, translations of Angare [Angaarey]. The one I know and can recommend is by Snehal Shingavi, from Penguin India. Rupa Publications also has its own translation. ]

In Defense of India's Literary Culture (Dalrymple, Bal, Jaipur, etc.)

There's an interesting -- though rather awkward -- debate up right now at Open Magazine, between William Dalrymple and Hartosh Singh Bal. The starting point for the debate is the status of the annual Jaipur International Literature Festival, which will be occurring this coming weekend in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

Before getting into the ins and outs of the debate, here is what one probably needs to read.

1. Here is Hartosh Singh Bal's starting volley:
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/the-literary-raj

2. Here is Dalrymple's response, "The Piece You Ran is Blatantly Racist":
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/the-piece-you-ran-is-blatantly-racist

3. And here is Bal's response to Dalrymple's "racism" charge:
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/does-dalrymple-know-what-racism-really-is

4. Here is a further response by Pramod Kumar, who claims that actually the Jaipur Literature festival was not exactly William Dalrymple's own idea in its original inception:
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/an-inconvenient-truth

* * *

I should begin by saying that I'm predisposed not to think very highly of Hartosh Singh Bal, because of the asinine essay he published in the same magazine in 2009, "Oh, For a Book to Ban!" (Chandrahas Choudhury at The Middle Stage responded to that essay ably here.)

To put it as succinctly as I can: I'm not really inclined to care very much what a literary critic who doesn't read books thinks.

That said, Bal, in his initial piece in the new "Open" debate, does seem to have improved, and done some journalistic homework this time around. He does make some valid points about some of the the problems with India's literary culture: there's no question that there is still a fair amount of symbolic and financial dependence on the West (though arguably it's as much the U.S. that drives that as it is the U.K.). Reading his essay it seemed to me that his target shouldn't be Dalrymple per se, but rather the overly deferential way Dalrymple is received by some Indians. Moreover, his complaint with the Jaipur festival isn't about the festival per se -- by all accounts, the festival is diverse and inclusive, though it certainly does trade on the celebrities that fly in to participate -- but again, the matter of perceptions. (It might be interesting to ask some Indian readers not clued into LRB and NYRB channels whose name means more to them: Ian McEwan, or Shobha De? William Dalrymple or Amitabh Bachchan?)

That said, I think it's worth pointing out some things about India's English-language literary culture. First, as someone who started out studying the first big wave of Indian English authors -- Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, and so on -- one of the things I always used to lament was the fact that all of these writers felt they had to leave India to make their careers happen. It was partly a symbolic matter -- they did want recognition from the London  literary establishment -- but it was at least as much financial. Anyone in their position in the 1970s would have done the same if they could, without really skipping a beat.

One sign of things changing is that that is no longer the case. There is a new vibrancy in the Indian publishing houses, and the Indian branches of transnational publishing companies (i.e., HarperCollins India and so on) that might well allow current and subsequent generations of writers to make a good living as writers without leaving India. Some of the younger writers whose books I've read and enjoyed in recent years fit in that category: Chandrahas Choudhury, Amit Varma, Samit Basu, Deepanjana Pal, and Dilip D'Souza come to mind (there are many, many others). Perhaps they are not getting paid on the scale of Arundhati Roy or Vikram Chandra (i.e., with the huge advances from American publishers), but the last I checked they seemed to be doing just fine.

The issue is not a lingering "Raj effect", it's whether there are publishing houses that can edit and produce serious books, whether there are journalists and magazines that can review those books, and finally whether there are readers who can buy and read those books. By almost any standard, the literary climate   (again, only talking about English for the moment) is much better now than it was 20 years ago. Why isn't that the real story here? At one point in his initial essay Bal asks, "How did a White man . . . become the pompous arbiter of literary merit in India?"  Someone only becomes an arbiter if others elect to make him one. Dalrymple is certainly influential, but there are plenty of Indian critics who can also be held up as "arbiters", including the afore-mentioned Chandrahas Choudhury; we might also mention Nilanjana Roy as a possible candidate for "Arbiter". Bal's piece, in other words, seems to be symptomatic of the very disease he claims to be trying to diagnose. 

* * *

I'm not going to go out of my way to defend Dalrymple here; he's perfectly capable of defending himself. I do think Bal was mistaken to focus on a "Raj" connection for Dalrymple, since Dalrymple really does not stand for that -- as anyone who's read his major books would know. (See: "The Last Mughal" or "White Mughals") For his part, I do think Dalrymple should probably not have responded to Bal with the "racism" charge, since it has proven to be a distraction from more substantive issues. (The cartoon was probably racist; the essay itself was more misdirected than anything else.)

Again, I think the substance of Bal's initial engagement with "Dalrymple" was more symbolic than real -- more focused on the problems with the Indian readers' deferentiality to Western authority -- so it's unclear why Dalrymple was even really his particular target. Isn't the real target Bal wants the Indian English reading public?

The best way to help foster a more intelligent literary culture, one that is driven more by ideas and substance than by cheap postures and obvious symbolism, is to actually focus on substance. How much more interesting would it have been to write a piece about the 2011 Jaipur International Literary Festival focusing not on Dalrymple and Ian McEwan, but on the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif (who is participating in the festival this year), or the great Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, one of the key figures in the Nayi Kavita [New Poetry] movement? Or the great Chinese, African, and Pakistani writers who are all gathering there this year? The saddest thing about this whole argument is that with all this vitriol we've wasted what might have been a good opportunity to have a different kind of conversation.

In Delhi, at the Library

For the past few days I've been ensconced in south Delhi, mainly visiting the city's research libraries as well as friends and family. It's winter in Delhi, which basically means the high is about 70 degrees F in the daytime -- and still quite sunny. In short, quite a pleasant change after Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, where the high was just about the freezing mark.

I was able to spend a fair number of hours at three different libraries in the city, the library at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the Sahitya Akademi library, and the Nehru Memorial Library (NML). This is just a brief report on what I found there, in case anyone is interested in visiting India for their own research.

First off, I should say that doing library research in Delhi is not actually that hard if you're coming from outside India. The main libraries are all housed in stately South Delhi, full of wide boulevards, government buildings, and Mughal-era tourist attractions (like Humayun's Tomb, Safdarjung, and Khan-e-Khanan). You are not in the busy markets (though there are plenty of markets and malls not far away), nor are you in amidst the throngs of humanity in Old Delhi or Connaught Place.

The second thing to know is that online/electronic search only takes you so far at these libraries, at least as of the present moment. You need to go and browse the stacks and actually talk to librarians in all cases to find out about the collections. In all three libraries I found that books also weren't resehelved especially carefully -- you sometimes have to poke around adjoining shelves and really look if you want to find particular things.

At JNU library, there was a nominal security presence, but I just said I was coming from a university in the U.S. and the guard let me in. The central library building is housed in a rather formidable 10 story structure.  As far as I could tell, the building does not have climate control, so the windows are kept open throughout the stacks (presumably year-round?). This means that the books are all quite dusty, and in various states of degradation. The collection is large, but the literature stacks are pretty spotty (the social sciences stacks actually looked much more impressive). I also couldn't find any of the old Hindi and English-language periodicals I was looking for in the stacks, so I asked the periodicals librarian. She sent me to one 'deputy', who then called on another, and they opened up a huge locked (!) room full of decaying bound periodicals, which as far as I could see were not actually "organized." After about 20 minutes of sleuthing, the three of us found a few volumes of one of the journals I wanted ("Indian Literature"), but at this point the Deputy apologetically told me that if I really wanted to do research on literature I should go to another library, such as the Sahitya Akademi.

As a side note, the JNU campus is an interesting place to visit. The university is known as a hub for the Indian left, and you see evidence of this in spades, as huge murals painted by the various left-leaning student parties have pride of place on many campus buildings. (I do not think many American colleges would allow this level of student club dominance.) You see much shrill denunciation of U.S. Imperialism, religious Communalism, as well as the policies of the center-left Congress Party currently in power. I briefly visited some of the bookstalls outside the library, and found one eager bookseller who was full of gossip about former JNU professors who now have posh teaching appointments in the U.S.

I followed the JNU Deputy Librarian's advice, and the next day went to the Sahitya Akademi library at Rabindra Bhawan. Here I found a collection much better maintained, with really extensive (virtually unparalleled) collections of literature in Indian languages. The materials related to English were perhaps less extensive, but still had quite a bit that I found helpful. I also found some great stuff in the Sahitya Akademi's collections of manuscripts from the Akademi's own prestigious International Seminars, including a talk by Aijaz Ahmad ("Times of the Modern") from 1996, that I think has never been formally published.

Finally, I was able to visit the Nehru Memorial Library at Teen Murti Bhawan. Here the star of the collection is clearly the material (in History, Political Science, and Economics) related to modern Indian history (starting with five extensive shelves marked "Gandhiana"). Also outstanding is the collection of old newspapers on microfilm. I did spend a few hours looking through some of these -- as far as I know, British Indian newspapers like the Civil and Military Gazette (from Lahore) or The Statesman (Calcutta) are not available like this at American university libraries. I will have to come back here and stay longer (for maybe two or three weeks) to do more digging for a certain side-project I want to do at some point.

Literature is somewhat besides the point at NML, but again I did find some helpful material for my project. My one warning for visitors from abroad is to make sure to get a "letter of reference" from your supervisor or chair. In this case the Librarian (who was very much not a Deputy) gave me a hard time about not having such a letter before letting me in anyway. (I would expect that you would want the letter on stationary -- I'm not sure that a printed-out email would suffice.)

At all three libraries I visited, the photocopying works like this: you give your materials to a man at the photocopy center for copying, and he does it for you. The rates are either 50 paisa or 1 Rupee (1 cent or 2 cents) per page. At first I found it a little odd -- for me, photocopying has always been one of the necessary miseries of library research -- but the nice thing about the arrangement is that it gives you a little more time to stay focused on your work. On this brief trip, having a few minutes more to explore the library was appreciated.

Another thing: you might want to pack a lunch if you are visiting these places -- no in-library cafes.

Now -- on to see family in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.

Another look at P. Lal -- With a Focus on the Poetry

A few weeks ago I did a post on the Calcutta Writers' Workshop. Just about two weeks later, P. Lal, the founder of the Writers Workshop, passed away, at the age of 81. 

It seems like a good time to say a bit more about P. Lal (Purushottama Lal), who originated from Punjab but spent his entire adult life in Calcutta, and who was the founder of what was quite literally the Cottage Industry of Indian Writing in English beginning in the 1950s and 60s. In the weeks since his death, some very perceptive, solid obituaries have come out. Here are a few links to some of the obits. I would recommend:

--In The Economist
--by Nilanjana Roy, in the Business Standard
--by Shahnaz Habib, in The Guardian
--by Shashi Deshpande, in The Hindu
--by K.N. Daruwalla, in The Hindu

In the post below, I'm going to quote from, and discuss briefly, some of P. Lal's poetry. The achievement for which Lal will be best known will undoubtedly be his tireless management of the Writers Workshop publishing house, but for many years he was also the editor of an important Indian-English literary journal, called The Miscellany, where he often published his own work alongside that of many other writers. He was also an author in his own right (mostly poetry, some stories), and a committed translator of Indian devotional texts, mainly from Sanskrit (though his translation of the Punjabi/Sikh Jap Ji Sahib is actually quite strong as well).

"Commonwealth" and "Postcolonial" Studies Journals: Some History

A few years ago, when I was going up for tenure at Lehigh, I did a blog post compiling links to several postcolonial studies journals I was looking at as possible venues for publication. At that time I was not in the habit of regularly reading academic journals; like a lot of people, I tended to focus more on academic books. For various reasons, I've been both reading academic journals more regularly and closely in recent years, and publishing in them more frequently since 2007.

I also don't think I mentioned here that this past summer I joined the Editorial Board of the Northampton, UK-based Journal of Postcolonial Writing as an Associate Editor. And as I've grown more involved with the inner workings of a busy academic journal, I've gotten interested in the complicated 'career arc' of this particualr journal (formerly World Literatures Written in English) as well as others like it -- journals founded in the 1960s and 70s, often with an approach quite different from what they currently print.

* * *

Another quick prefatory comment: I have been helping out a colleague at another university with an article she's working on, on the institutional history of the field -- specifically, the interaction between "Postcolonial" literary studies and "Commonwealth"  literary studies, and the goal of this blog post to put together some of my own thoughts related to the different journals.

"Commonwealth" refers, of course, to literature of the British Commonwealth of Nations, an organization with 54 member nations, all but two of which were former British colonies. The Commonwealth idea was conceived in the 1880s, as a way to grant semi-autonomy to settler colonies like New Zealand and Australia, and it rapidly expanded after Indian and Pakistani independence (since both new nations joined the Commonwealth). Beginning with the Harare Declaration (1971), the Commonwealth has been 'post-colonially correct' -- which is to say, it has clearly indicated that member countries are a group of sovereign states on an equal footing. It has also focused on alleviating poverty and fostering development in poorer countries.

And clearly, the Commonwealth concept was not really in question this past summer, when Delhi hosted the Commonwealth Games, which was according to some observers an astounding success and to others a total catastrophe. (The fact that many Commonwealth nations are also cricket-playing nations probably doesn't hurt the popular and mass-cultural recognition of the term.) All in all, the Commonwealth of Nations organization seems to be alive and well; indeed, there are several pending applications for membership from countries that were never British colonies -- Algeria and Sudan, for instance. As to what precisely the organization actually does, that might be the subject of another post.

Despite the change in the status of the Commonwealth of Nations, the term "Commonwealth Literature," as most people know, has largely gone out of fashion in recent years. The most famous critique of the idea of Commonwealth Literature is probably Salman Rushdie's 1983 essay "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist" (republished in Imaginary Homelands, 1990). And following Rushdie, the most significant event marking the decline of Commonwealth Lit. might be Amitav Ghosh's famous decision, in 2001, not to accept the regional Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia) for his book, The Glass Palace. Ghosh objected to the idea and term "Commonwealth," but he also had a problem with the English-only requirement for the prize. (Other Commonwealth Literature institutions, such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, do not have an Anglophone literature-only policy.) The core of Ghosh's complaint, however, was evident in the following sentences:

So far as I can determine, The Glass Palace is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it was written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain. Of the many reasons why a book's merits may be recognized these seem to me to be the least persuasive. That the past engenders the present is of course undeniable; it is equally undeniable that the reasons why I write in English are ultimately rooted in my country's history. Yet, the ways in which we remember the past are not determined solely by the brute facts of time: they are also open to choice, reflection and judgment. The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of "the Commonwealth". I therefore ask that I be permitted to withdraw The Glass Palace from your competition. 

Ghosh's comments (the full letter is reproduced here, along with further comments in support from Amitava Kumar) remain at a somewhat abstract level. I interpret him to mean something like this: yes, we have to acknowledge the history and legacy of colonialism (indeed, The Glass Palace is largely about that history). But we should have the right to redefine our present selves separately from that legacy. The larger point seems to be that the term "Commonwealth writers" or "Commonwealth Literature" cannot help but be a kind of celebration of British colonialism.

The British Journal of Commonwealth Literature is still going strong despite the critiques of the word Commonwealth such as Ghosh's and Rushdie's. In 2005, two editors of the journal wrote an introduction on the fortieth anniversary of the journal, defending their decision not to update the title despite the changing fortunes of "Commonwealth":

Nevertheless, more than a dozen years on, the decision to keep the Journal’s original title seems right. Although post-colonial studies have come to occupy a central position in the metropolitan academy’s curricula, the term has frequently been rejected by writers and readers, who see it as a strait-jacket that encloses them within a limited and predictable range of political agendas. “Post-colonialism”, particularly when used in the singular, offers a curious mirror-image of the “one-world” discourse of globalization, which it supposedly contests. At its worst it is an exclusive term, which homogenizes the “rest of the world” in a counter-image of the older European imperialisms or US neo-imperialism. Meanwhile multinational publishers commodify and disseminate the work of cosmopolitan writers who interpret “other” societies for a Western or “global” readership. Arguably “Commonwealth literature”, with its emphasis on inclusivity, continues to be more genuinely eclectic and to invite approaches that can be related to a broader-based set of non-Western humanisms. (John Thieme. Editorial: "JCL Forty Years On," JCL 40:1, 2005)

There's a valid point here, though it's too bad John Thieme doesn't respond directly to the critique made by Ghosh, which we quoted above. Instead, his approach is to suggest that Commonwealth continues to work as a pragmatic signifier, in large part because "Postcolonial" is, as he sees it, worse. It's also unfortunate that he doesn't cite any specific scholars or theorists whose definition matches the "post-colonialism" he doesn't like.

The person cited by Thieme and Alistair Niven as instrumental in the founding of JCL (and the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies -- ACLALS) is A. N. Jeffares. Jeffares, who was Irish (and a scholar of Yeats), was responsible for the first ever conference devoted to Commonwealth Literature at the University of Leeds, in 1964. The proceedings of that conference were published in book form by Heinemann, as Commonwealth Literature: Unity and Diversity in a Common Culture. Jeffares' introduction to the conference (and the volume that it provoked) are widely cited by scholars who have thought about the status of Commonwealth literature since then, including especially Tim Watson (2000).

Interestingly, though he's credited as the driving force behind the advent of Commonwealth literary studies, Jeffares was not the first editor of JCL, though he did go on to serve as the first editor of the Canadian journal Ariel: A Review of International Literature (founded in 1970 at the University of Calgary, where it remains). Ariel bypassed the terminological morass by always defining itself as focused on "international" literature -- which means its first issues could comfortably and without contradiction contain essays on all sorts of topics, from George Herbert, to Canadian authors, to the Caribbean writer Wilson Harris. Over time, and with subsequent editorships, Ariel has come to be seen as primarily (though not exclusively), a "postcolonial" journal. The journal published a pair of special issues in 1995 debating the pros and cons of the postcolonial turn in literary studies, and then returned to the subject in another special issue in 2000.

Another journal that was founded in the 1960s/70s was World Literature in English. WLWE was first based at the University of Texas for several years, before moving to University of Guelph (where it was edited by Diana Bryden for several years). The journal had a brief stint based in Singapore (under the editorship of Kirpal Singh), before finding its current home at the University of Northampton, UK.

Importantly, in 2005, WLWE deviated from the path set by JCL when it did change names, becoming, under Janet Wilson's editorship, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JPW). In her brief editorial announcing the change, Wilson did not say much about the debates over terms such as "world literature," "Commonwealth literature" or "postcolonial literature"; she simply suggested that the move from WLWE to JPW was a way of moving towards "theoretical respectability."

Even as these journals were either changing (or, in JCL's case, not changing), several new postcolonial literature and theory journals came into being in the 1980s and 1990s, including especially Wasafiri (University of Kent), Interventions (whose first editor was Robert JC Young, then at Oxford), Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne), Jouvert (a U.S.-based online journal, now defunct), Kunapipi (another Australian journal, which I think is also defunct), Diaspora (a cultural studies and anthropology journal, by and large), The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (based at George Southern University), and Postcolonial Text (also based in Australia). Of these newer journals (and I may be missing some), the most influential have perhaps been Wasafiri and Interventions. 

One major journal that I haven't mentioned is Transition, which was started in Uganda in 1961, with a pan-Africanist focus (publishing essays by writers like Ngugi, Achebe... and Skip Gates!). Transition was famously edited by Wole Soyinka until it was disbanded in 1976. The journal was then revived in the 1990s, though it was published in the U.S. (it's now housed at Indiana University Press), and in its reincarnation it seems to be quite a different beast. There are also "Area Studies" literature journals, specifically South Asian Review (with which I have been involved, in the past), as well as the solidly established Research in African Literatures. But these journals, as important as they may be in their respective fields, are still not as widely circulating or as influential as their more 'transnational' (postcolonial, commonwealth) peers. Area studies is, in short, still an academic ghetto: it's still much better for you if you say you teach and write on "Postcolonial literature" than "Indian literature" or "Nigerian literature." That's unfortunate, but it seems to be a fact of life in the British and North American academies. (I wrote about this a bit in the second half of an essay in the South Asian Review issue I guest-edited with Kavita Daiya a few years ago: see here).

So where does that leave us? On the one hand, the proliferation of the new Postcolonial journals, alongside the continued vibrancy (and frequent self-reinvention) of the older Commonwealth and World Literature journals, suggests the field is bigger and more established than it's ever been. Even so, certain critiques of the term "postcolonial" seem to have struck a chord (Aijaz Ahmed, Arif Dirlik, Ella Shohat, and more recently David Scott) -- and they haven't gone away. In the inaugural essay to Interventions, Robert Young seemed to acknowledge as much when he wrote:

Whatever one might say about the troubled term 'postcolonial' -- and we take the discussions of that on board, but as read -- one characteristic aspect of postcolonial writing, be it creative or critical, involves its historical and political agenda, which in broad terms give it common objectives. This is the reason why, just as with feminism, postcolonialism offers a politics rather than a coherent theoretical methodology. Indeed you could go so far as to argue that strictly speaking there is no such thing as postcolonial theory as such -- rather  there are shared political perceptions and agenda which employ an eclectic range of theories in their service. Moreover, as with some feminisms, a substantial constituency of postcolonial writing is radically anti-theoretical, giving a primacy to the value of individual consciousness and experience. Postcolonialism's curious combination of heterogeneous theories with a sometimes problematic or even condescending counter-affirmation of the truth of experiential knowledge, is an articulation too easily characterized either as the postcolonial predicament or as a disjunction between the western academy and 'Third World' conditions of existence. (Robert JC Young, 1998. Full essay available on the author's website here)

I thought this was an interesting way of putting things: there may not be a theoretical commonality, but there is a shared political praxis. What's surprising about this claim is of course that so many critics of postcolonial theory have questioned precisely that -- for Left (Marxist) critics of Postcolonial studies, the problem has always been that much Postcolonial theory has distanced itself from Marxism or from a concrete political agenda. Someone like Arundhati Roy may be admired by many Postcolonial intellectuals, but almost no one is actually standing up and agreeing with her on, say, the Maoist insurgency in eastern and southern India. It sometimes seems that being 'postcolonial' is a way of positioning oneself as generally aligned with the plight of poor, non-western societies -- without having to make hard ideological choices regarding how to alleviate the suffering of people in those societies.

The debates that follow Young's opening volley in the first few issues of Interventions are quite fascinating, though it would make this blog post too long to actually engage that material substantively (perhaps in a subsequent post).

One big issue I have been thinking about is the status of the American academy in particular vis a vis the advent and institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies. Some critics have argued that Postcolonial Studies was really initiated in the American academy, and that the various and proliferating institutional appearances of postcolonial studies groups and journals are nothing more than attempts to copy an intellectual model initiated in the U.S. The best support for this way of seeing things comes from the fact that so many key figures have taught in American universities, including especially the theory 'triumvirate' of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said. But one could also question this reading of American dominance, since the U.S. still does not have a regular "postcolonial studies" national association or conference (by contrast, the UK has a Postcolonial Studies Association). Moreover, of the journals I've named here, the vast majority are in fact based at institutions or with publishers outside of the U.S. -- the UK, Canada, and Australia -- suggesting that the supposed dominance of American academic institutions may be overstated.

* * *
So here are my discussion questions for readers -- feel free to write in at Facebook or in comments here, as you wish, if you have any thoughts.

First, is postcolonial literary studies and theory primarily an 'American' academic institution in your perception?

Second, does "postcolonial studies" mean something different in the different places where it is institutionally (academically) practiced (i.e., can we compare its status in the UK with its status in Canada, its status in India, or its status in Australia)?


Third, is the field rising or falling? Has it been superseded by "globalization studies"?

Fourth, what is the status of the literary in current postcolonial theory? While many of the initial concepts in postcolonial theory came from literary theorists, it has sometimes seemed to me more recently that the momentum for postcolonial studies in recent years has shifted to the social sciences, particularly cultural anthropology.

A Brief Note About Jainendra Kumar's "The Resignation"

I came across Jainendra Kumar's The Resignation (Tyaga-Patra ; 1937) as I was combing through the library looking for work associated with Ajneya, a figure I have been mentioning on and off in a number of recent blog posts. It turns out that Ajneya translated a novel by Jainendra Kumar, a Hindi novelist who was well-known in the 1930s but who has in more recent years dropped off the map. Jainendra Kumar seems interesting as a misfit in his era -- while his peers in the 1930s were generally somewhat optimistically Progressive, Jainendra seems thoroughly alienated, anticipating in some ways the turn towards the New Story in Hindi fiction in the 1950s and 60s.

Ajneya's preface to The Resignation gestures at Jainendra's oddness:

Jainendra Kumar appeared on the literary horizon in 1929, his first published work being a book of short stories. (This was followed shortly after by a novel, Parakh (The Criterion) which won immediate recgonition from critics as well as from the general public, and was also awarded the Hindustani Academy prize. Thereafter the author's rise to prominence was phenomenal, and within a few years he was probably the most talked of figure in Hindi literature, not only because of the high literary quality of his subsequent work, but also, and possibly more, on account of the disturbing originality of his creative outlook. His thought, his story material, his characters, even his language, was provokingly different, and each new novel seemed to define more clearly a philosophy that was in startling contrast with the nationalistic aspirations current at the time.

Update on "After the Wars"

Several friends on Facebook had further suggestions for the "After the Wars" course I mentioned in my blog post yesterday. Here are some of the suggestions I received:

George Orwell, Burmese Days
Graham Greene, The Quiet American 
William Somerset Maugham's short stories set in Malaysia and Borneo
Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat, Petals of Blood, or The River Between
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Andre Malraux, Antimemoirs
Nuruddin Farah, Gifts or Maps

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

One friend wrote a very long comment, which I'll reproduce part of here, since it is full of good ideas:

Ngugi is a shocking omission as well imo, A Grain of Wheat and Petals of Blood are the classic novels about anti-colonialism and the Mau Mau as part of Kenyan nationalist consciousness but there is also the very powerful The River Between which covers the clash of cultures brought about by globalisation (in its earlier incarnation) through the symbolic issue of FGM.

 Similarly, South African fiction is important; I would perhaps junk some of the less challenging and well-known works like The English Patient and go with something like Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians -- very apt if you are thinking of the Afghanistan wars in my opinion.

New Course in the works: After the Wars--Literature of Globalization

I'm teaching a new course in spring 2011 called "After the Wars: Literature of Globalization." I got the idea after re-reading Kim during the summer, while the Obama administration was waging an aggressive--but seemingly still doomed--campaign to finally try and dislodge the Taliban. It seemed hard not to think of connections between the British campaigns in Afghanistan (which are in some ways alluded to in Kipling's novel) and the current American war there.

It's hard to escape the fact that modern wars accelerate the process of globalization, moving large numbers of soldiers and others to different parts of the world, often provoking complex new social and economic realities in the process.

At the same time, one must accept that modern, global wars do not truly encourage unrestricted cross-cultural encounters. If anything, they can lead societies that may seem relatively open at one point to reinforce their political borders. 9/11 is a case in point here, not so much as a moment when "everything changed" (that kind of rhetoric comes to seem ever more misplaced as the years go by), but rather as a moment at which the euphoria of globalization in the 1990s suddenly changed course. If the 1990s was the decade during which we saw many more people celebrating -- and sometimes resisting -- the idea of globalization, the 2000s seemed to be a decade during which a new anti-globalization ethos came into being, not just in the United States, but in Europe as well.

A question one has to consider in thinking about globalization is: how much of this really new? To what extent is the contemporary experience of globalization different from or similar to the wave of  that began during the peak years of European Imperialism (1870-1945), itself an era of innumerable wars? One could also focus more narrowly on just World War II, an event led to widespread displacement, migration, and political realignment. How did globalization during and immediately after World War II differ from the era that began in the early 1990s?

Another key question is the role of war: how do large wars, involving the migration of thousands or millions of individuals, impact the movement of people, ideas, cultures, and technology? Is it possible that with continued globalization leading to ever larger populations of displaced and immigrant groups, we might see a decline in the conventional idea of 'national' identity, and the emergence of a new concept of global belonging?

If you were teaching this course, what books might you assign? (The only strict parameters I have are: 1) 1870-present moment; 2) something to do with war and globalization.)

After the jump, a preliminary syllabus.

Mulk Raj Anand: on the Language Debate and his Aunt's Caste-related Suicide

For a long time I resisted reading much of Mulk Raj Anand's work -- there simply seemed to be too much, and much of what I had looked at seemed overblown and under-edited. Also, I was impatient.

Re-approaching him as a more mature reader leads to somewhat of a mixed bag. Novels like The Road and Coolie are highly readable and focused. Meanwhile my view on Untouchable remains essentially unchanged, and I did not much enjoy Two Leaves and a Bud -- a novel that seems a little too inspired by the "Quit India" fervor of its time to be of much interest to us today.

As often happens, I've come to understand the novelist a little better by delving into his personal biography, with two particular questions in mind: what made him want to be a writer, and what made him want to be a writer in English? Along those lines, I've been reading sections of Anand's autobiographical novels, Seven Summers, Morning Face, Confessions of a Lover, and The Bubble. While there are a fair amount of material in these books to be skimmed or skipped (often the now-dated discussions of politics and ideology), there are also some more personal sections that seem intensely interesting. Below, I'll quote a little from a section of Anand's Confessions of a Lover that deals with the death of the protagonist's aunt, Devaki.

Finally, I've also started reading, generally for the first time, Anand's various essays, anthologies, and what letters are available (as far as I know, no authoritative biography of the writer has ever been written -- seems like a remarkable absence). One that seems to be of particular interest is Anand's essay on language, The King-Emperor's English, or The Role of the English Language in the Free India (published in India, 1948).

Revisiting the Calcutta Writers Workshop

I remember finding volumes printed by the Calcutta Writers Workshop while browsing the library as a young graduate student, but at the time I didn't have much context or understanding of the history of the group or its philosophy. Indeed, at that time I found the books to be kind of shoddy -- the hand-printed aspect of the volumes made them seem archaic.

More recently, as I've been researching "modernism" in India and Pakistan, I've been learning more, and I now have a much greater appreciation of what P. Lal and company were trying to do. First, a little background: Calcutta Writers Workshop was founded in 1958 by a group of seven writers -- mainly as a venue to share poetry. By 1960, the group had begun publishing chapbooks of poetry and small books of criticism; they also started a journal called Miscellany. The group is still active as a publishing house, with recent volumes listed on its website here.

I would also recommend readers check out P. Lal's essay on the founding of the Writers Workshop here. And see the profile of P. Lal in The Hindu, from last year.

Mir Baqi and the Babri Mosque: Some Historical Footnotes

Many of us who follow the issue of communalism in India have found ourselves somewhat vexed by the recent verdict by the Allahabad high court regarding the disputed Mosque at Ayodhya. I won't review the basic facts of the case: see Wikipedia for starters. With regards to opinions on the verdict, Siddharth Varadarajan's perspective in The Hindu seems pretty compelling to me. I do not think this is a very good opinion based on the merits of the case as I understand them (though it may be a good practical decision for the short run).

Instead of injecting more opinion, I thought I would add some material that may not be that readily accessible to readers regarding the archeological evidence. As is widely known, the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya (or Babri Masjid as it is generally known in India) is thought to have been built in 1528 by a general of the Mughal Emperor Babur, Mir Baqi. There are a number of historical and archeological questions at issue, but two of the most important ones I have been wondering about are:

1) Is there any evidence that there was a Hindu temple, or a Ram temple, at the site before the Mosque was built? If so, is there any evidence that that structure was in fact destroyed in order to build the Mosque? On the second part of this question, the Allahabad court did not accept any evidence that any previous structure was destroyed. But the first part of the question leads to a number of complex issues, which we'll discuss further below.

2) How clear is it that the Mosque was in fact built by Mir Baqi in 1528, given that Babur does not mention any Mosque at Ayodhya in the Babur-Nama, otherwise a very reliable and detailed historical chronicle of Babur's reign? Again, my historical sources lead in conflicting directions on this issue. The main evidence for the date and the builder come from an inscription left by Mir Baqi specifying the date and builder, discovered by Annette Beveridge, who produced the first English translation of the Babur-Nama. But some historians doubt the veracity of this inscription.

Translation Workshop: Prabhjot Kaur's "Bewildered" (UPDATED)

My first attempt a couple of months ago at translating from Punjabi was humbling, but I'm back to give it another shot. As readers may remember, with help from a couple of friends, I put forth an attempt at a translation in the earlier post, only to find that Jasdeep of Parchanve did a much better job of it in the comments.

I'm still looking at the same anthology of Experimental Punjabi Poetry from 1962 (Prayogashil Punjabi Kavita), though this time I'm looking at a poem by Prabhjot Kaur, "Pashemaan Haan," or "Bewildered." This time, with humility in mind, I'll just translate the first three verses today, and put out a call for help from our friend in Chandigarh (Jasdeep) as well as anyone else who might wish to help. The poem is on the theme of corruption....

Why I don't like Mulk Raj Anand's "Untouchable" (and a few examples of novels dealing intelligently with caste)

When asked to suggest a novel that describes the caste system in India, the first one that comes to mind for many people, especially outside of India, is Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. But turning to that novel always feels like a cop-out to me, and I wish it weren't quite so 'canonical' as it is. It's not simply that Anand isn't himself from an 'untouchable' caste (or as we would say now, a Dalit) -- in fact, most well-known Indian writers who have addressed caste in their works have come from upper caste backgrounds. The problem with Untouchable is that it doesn't really come close to being convincing in its attempt to approximate the perspective of Bakha. A passage that is a case in point might be the following:

The blood in Bakha's veins tingled with the heat as he stood before it. His dark face, round and solid and exquisitely well defined, lit with a queer sort of beauty. The toil of the body had built up for him a very fine physique. It seemed to suit him,to give a homogeneity, a wonderful wholeness to his body, so that you could turn round and say: 'Here is a man.' And it seemed to give him a nobility, strangely in contrast with his filthy profession and with the sub-human status to which he was condemned from birth.

The strength of this passage might be in Anand's interest in depicting the physicality of Bakha's body -- he was clearly reading modernists like Joyce and Lawrence as he was writing, and the novel is strongly marked by that. But the weaknesses are also evident, starting with phrases like "a queer sort of beauty," which is effectively a kind of exoticism (purely exteriorized), rather than an observed description. Another phrase that troubles me is "a wonderful wholeness to his body," which sounds like Lawrence or maybe Hardy -- and again, it's an ideological descriptor; what it says is hard work makes Bakha beautiful. Anand does not really show us here anything that is particular or unique about Bakha himself, as an individuated character.

And this kind of problem recurs throughout the book. Bakha's actual caste is never named; he is simply described as an "untouchable." The book, in the end, works better as a work of Gandhian agit-prop by proxy than it does as a novel.

There are actually much better novels that deal with caste issues in one way or another. I mentioned Godaan in some recent blog posts -- and that might be one place to start. Another book that comes to mind for me is Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, which is a really closely observed look at the experience of a group of characters from the Chamaar caste in Bombay after independence. And yet another novel that comes to mind might be The God of Small Things, though Roy's novel is so over-loaded with themes (including also incest, the separation anxiety of twins Estha and Rahel, the Communist party, etc.) that it's sometimes hard to say what the novel is primarily about.

One book dealing with caste I would unreservedly recommend is U.R. Anantha Murthy's novel, Samskara. This is a novel published in 1965, originally in the Kannada language. It was translated into English in 1978, and is pretty widely available in the west (it's currently still in print at Amazon). The power of Anantha Murthy's novel lies in its close attention to the specifics of Brahminic rituals, and the sometimes convoluted logic of 'pollution' in a village Brahmin society. The limitation, perhaps, is that Samskara is so narrowly focused on Brahmins; the other caste groups are present as potential threats (or objects of desire).

Finally, when I raised a question on Twitter ("what are your favorite novels dealing with caste?"), Jasdeep of the Punjabi translation blog Parchanve had this answer: "Anne ghorhe da daan by gurdiaal singh(novel), Kutti vehda by maninder singh, Kaang (punjabi short story)". I must admit I've read none of these, though I've heard others (specifically, Prof. Rana Nayar Punjab University) speak quite highly of Gurdial Singh -- stay tuned.

Gordon Roadarmel and Modern Hindi Literature

One of the key critics in looking at modernism in Hindi literature in particular is the American critic and translator, Gordon Roadarmel. Today Roadarmel is probably better known as a translator (i.e., of Godaan) than as a critic, mainly because we have several excellent published translations from him, while his 1969 dissertation from UC-Berkeley was never formally published. (In terms of translations, Roadarmel also did a collection of stories called "A Death in Delhi," and a translation of Agyeya's novel Apne Apne Anjani [To Each His Stranger].) The fact that such seminal research went unpublished is hard for me to fathom, though it may be that the critic's premature death in 1971 may have had more than a little to do with it.

Luckily, I was able to track down a copy of Roadarmel's dissertation in bound form at Penn, and have been reading it this week. Here I wanted to offer a few helpful quotes from him as regards the 'modernist' (or experimental) turn in modern Hindi fiction, which is sometimes described as the "Nayi Kahani" (or New Story).

Here is Roadarmel's account of the emergence of that movement in the late 1950s:

[T]he popularity of the [short] story seems to have been first noted in print by a writer calling himself Chakradhar, in the April 1954 issue of Kalpana an important literary journal. He says: "After a long time, short stories have again begun to attract readers." A change in the nature of the stories was noted by the son of Premchand, Shripat Ray, writing in the New Year issue of Kahani in 1956:

I began to wonder whether I might be behind the pace of the times and therefore was not noting the progress in the Hindi story which ought to be expected... The form of the story was changing and perhaps I, because of my old traditions, was asking of the story what today was not characteristic of it.

The naming of the new group is credited to Namwar Singh, probably in an article published in Kahani just a year after Shripat's comments. Namwar wrote: 'In thinking about the story today, the first thing that comes to my mind is the question as to whether, like 'nayi kavita,' there is also such a thing as 'nayi kahani.'

In 1957 the term Nayi Kahani became generally applied to the new writing, though debate has never stopped as to the appropriateness of the term. By 1957, Hindi literary circles generally had hailed the material appearing in that issue of Kahani early in 1956. A year before, in 1955, eighty percent of the stories in the special issue of the periodical were by older writers. In this 1956 issue, eighty percent were by the newer writers; and "in the Hindi world there was such wide discussion of this issue and such a warm welcome that the foundation of the revival of the story was established."

In subsequent pages, Roadarmel goes on to talk about the initial divergence in the Nayi Kahani movement between authors who were more interested in 'rural' fiction and those who were more thematically 'urban'. One text mentioned as aligned with the rural-ist Nahi Kahani is Phanishwer Nath Renu's 1954 Maili Anchal (The Soiled Border). But this debate died down relatively quickly, and over time, the urban sensibility came to predominate.