Malay Roy Choudhury
The Daily Star: Postmodern Bangla Short Stories: the arrival of the departure
The Gift of the Colonial Magi
Malay Roy Choudhury

Having published a few English translations of Bangla short stories in this page I have of late been asked questions like ‘What kind of short stories were these?’ ‘What did they mean?’ ‘Were they written by ‘experimental’ authors?’ ‘I didn’t understand them at all.’

Fair enough. To readers of this page, the stories referred to seemed to violate all established norms of good storytelling: a beginning, an end, recognizable characters, a ‘meaning’ to be drawn from the tale, and the satisfied murmur at the end from a reader whose expectations have been skillfully aroused, and then met. However, the short stories published on this page broke away from the mould, seemed to zigzag in time, had no coherent pattern, had characters who drifted in and out from the margins, and, like the whole story, seemed to have no fixed center, in fact seemed at times not to inhabit any space at all, and the repeated authorial intrusions seemed to deliberately draw attention to the fact that ‘stories’ are artifices that should reveal the ‘hand’ consciously fashioning the tale (in fact, that seemed to be the real ‘story’ in each of these ‘stories’: how stories get made, that the process is the thing).

Obviously definitions of ‘literature’ and ‘fiction’ are undergoing changes. Fiction in English reflected one such change–a trending towards postmodernism– quite some time back. It arrived in Bangla literature and fiction more recently–granted, in the works of the more ‘experimental’ and ‘avant-garde’ writers, in out-of-the-way little magazines and journals, in volumes from the more outré publishers. One thing, however, is clear: Postmodernism, for good or bad, is here to stay in the fiction written in Bangla, both across the border and here.

So what is it? How did some Bangla short stories (and novels) arrive at this point? How does one make sense of it? The answer is attempted in the following long essay by Malay Roy Choudhury (Postmodern Bangla Short Stories 2002, Haowa 49 Publishers, Kolkata), long enough in fact that it has to be published in installments. It is difficult to read, and the author has tried to cover a broad –as well as a contentious–area. All of which means that the piece contains a fair amount of specialist literary terms and assumptions not easily grasped by the average reader. Plus the earnest style (the baggage of critical literary theory, which at times seems not to function without the words ‘episteme’ or ‘metropolitan’) and erroneous ad hoc declarations (that, for example, the ‘novel started in European antiquity’) can be wearisome. But the essay nevertheless has one radiant quality: its very theme! Malay Roy Choudhury does wish to answer the question what is the postmodern Bangla short story as honestly and comprehensively as he can. And in doing so necessarily provides an interesting interpretation of its history. At the very least, his analytic framework has the merit of consistency.

So to all those readers who have questioned me, and perhaps will continue to do so, on the subject of ‘experimental’ Bangla short stories being written by a younger set of writers interested in the politics of language and culture, who feel the press of postcolonial theory, who are sympathetic to the increasing assertion of forces, political and linguistic, of vernaculars previously considered marginal, here is my answer: Seek The Daily Star literature page from now on, and ye shall find. If not the answer, then at least the right questions.

—Editor, Literature Page

Chhotogolpo, synonym for short story, is a hybridized word. Chhoto having been derived from prakrita or plebianized Sanskrit chhudda or chutta, which meant short, small, tiny, dwarfish, low-pitched, little, reduced, puny, delicate, minor, etc. Golpo is a hybrid of gappo and jalpo. Gappo is plebianized Bangla version of Persian gupp that entered indigenous lexical domain consequent upon establishment of Islamic rule. It meant oral narrative, conversation, argument, gossip, prattle, etc. It had also entered English lexicon as gup, in the guise of an Anglo-Saxon slang during the gin-and-tonic days of the Empire. Almost all indigenous words which entered the imperial semiotics received a degenerated reception. Hindu gods became lords, and god Jaggannatha became juggernaut, a strange expression which meant a relentless destroying force; an example of colonial semiotic violence transforming the native’s protector into a destroyer. Jalpo evolved out of Sanskrit jalpan, and meant utterance, discussion, speculation, proposal, and establishment of one’s own opinion by refuting someone else’s.

Narratives at folk level as well as at the level of the court of kings, in brief or elaborate form, existed prior to the arrival of British Empire, written in poetic meters to enable people to memorize them, in the absence of literacy and nonavailability of nonmanual process of reproduction, as the texts were calligraphed on palm-leaves. In essence, therefore, indigenous story-texts existed since antiquity, outside the perimeters of the constructedness of fables, but within the confines of nature, i.e. tale. However, the indigenous culture did not have exact equivalents of fables and tales, since the genres were based on the Greco-Roman dialects of good and evil, and papal dialectics of God and Devil, which assumed human individual as a cultural product and subject to construction. Premodern Bangla had katha or narrative, and kathakata or narration of scriptural and mythological oral chronicles. The narrator was kathak-thakur or Brahmin priest, and may be found even today in a metamorphosed gaiety during any puja trying to re-root himself in antiquity in front of a loudspeaker mike; he would be worshipping goddess Durga, demon Mahishasura, and a veiled banana plant simultaneously, in a postmodern anomie, of course.

Fiction is indigenous, though in metrical form. However, the genres short story and novel came with colonial rule. Novel was a product of European Renaissance, and the original genre novella was Italian, which emerged during that great epistemic upheaval, though the rudiments thereof existed since second-century Greece. Novel was coterminous as an established genre with the appearance of Rene Descartes’ theory of knowledge. Descartes’ theory starts with the quest for certainty, for an indubitable starting-point or foundation on the basis alone of which progress is possible; the point of certainty had to be located in one’s own awareness of one’s own self. Renaissance and Descartes would not have been possible without such royal plunderers as Christopher Columbus, an Italian. Novel was generic outcome of the concepts of individuals’ self-location, progress and seizure of nature. None of these philosophical ideas existed in premodern life/world of Bangla people, for whom nothing existed outside nature.

In fact the synonym for culture, i.e. samskruti, had to be coined by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). The appellative upanyas, synonym for novel, was coined by Bankimchandra Chattopadhya (1838-1894) who had first written Rajmohan’s Wife (1864), a novel in English, before writing the first ever novel in Bangla literature, Durgeshnandini (1865), a fiction in prose. Economic and political powers in Europe, when novel emerged, were agriculture-centric and rested with landowners who had time for leisure.

Short story emerged in Europe with the Industrial Revolution, and the epistemic paradigm shift caused by European Enlightenment. Industrial Revolution replaced traditional agrarian economy by one dominated by machinery and manufacturing. This transferred the balance of political power from the landowner to the industrial capitalist, and created a huge urban working class. The slow agrarian idyllic life was replaced by a fast industrially-compartmented life without much leisure for a large population. The subject-position of the individual changed beyond retreat. While the history of rise and fall of the novel in Europe is associated with the rise and fall of imperialism, the rise and change of short story is associated with the centrality and fragmentation of the modern human individual. Novel emerged in European antiquity. Short story emerged in European modernity. Both of them arrived on the shores of Bangla literature at the same time, when the representatives of European Enlightenment, the Christian missionaries, settled at Srirampur in 1800, simultaneously introduced Bangla printing press, translated prose of gospels and the Bible, Bangla grammar books and Bangla dictionaries. The first gospel of the first century Christian apostle and evangelist St. Matthew was the mother of printed Bangla prose, which appeared on 18 March 1880. This was also the year of establishment of Fort William College. And this was the juncture when a Bangla speaker of letters left the world of nature to join the world of culture, in order to get constructed as an individual in the mirror image of Enlightenment episteme.

Groomed in the above episteme, a sizeable Bangla middle class originated, and spread with the British as their reliable appendages, throughout India. Bangla periodicals with news and fiction had to appear for, by and of the newly constructed individuals of this class. Though newsmagazines such Digdarshan (April 1818), Samachar Darpan (May 1818) and Sambad Prabhakar appeared first to cater to the cultural needs of this class, they contained the seeds of the subsequent literary periodicals like Bangadarshan (1872), Bharati, Sadhana, Hitavadi, Navajivan and Sahitya, published in the 19th century. For publishing Bangadarshan, Bankimchandra Chattapadhya had installed printing press at his own residence. The contentious issue relating to strict definability of novel and short story might not have been imported till then, and all fictions were golpo. The eighteen-page fiction Indira (1872) and fifteen-page fiction Yugalanguria (1873) written by Bankimchandra and fourteen-page fiction Madhumati (1873) written by his brother Purnachandra were all published under the rubric of upanyas or novel. It was more than eighty years later, when the power of definition, distinction and evaluation of literary discourse rested with academicians that the former two were declared to be neither novel nor short story whereas the latter was branded as a short story, since by then definitions imported from the West had piled up in the volumes stacked in college libraries. But the first canonisable perfect short story did not appear till Rabindranath Tagore wrote Postmaster (1891) in the weekly Hitavadi.

However, the works of Mir Mosharraf Hossain (1847-1912), poet, novelist and playwright, failed to get canonised, primarily because formation of Muslim middle class individual in the new episteme of Enlightenment was delayed as the rulers whom the Empire decimated were mostly Muslim. The community initially refused to be subsumed in the language of emerging Bangla literature because of what was considered Hinduani semiotic and semantic features. For the Hindu individual, this also was one of the reasons to move closer to the new episteme. In third volume of Bengal in 1756-1757, historian Hill had written ‘Genuine (i.e. Hindoo) rajahs and inhabitants were much disaffected to the Moor (i.e. Mohammedan) government and secretly wished for a change and opportunity of throwing off their tyrannical yoke.’ The first fiction of a Muslim author to be canonised came quite late in Byathar Daan (1922) by Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1977). In fact, this is the only Muslim name I find in Budhed Choudhury’s voluminous dissertation on short story Bangla Sahityer Chhotogolpo O Golpokar (1962), spanning a period from 1800 to 1940, and no such reference in Sahitye Chhotogolpo (1956) by Narayan Gangapadhya, though the books are studded with names from classical and modern European literatures.

Thenceforth canonisation could be possible only within European maxims. But the strictest maxim was that no printed matter should be against the interest of the Empire. Short story therefore had to be confined to a defined freedom of the author, sort of a four-walled discourse. Indigenous diverse oral forms were never drawn upon and ultimately withered away in neglect. Since the first grammar books and dictionaries were written and printed by European missionaries, Bangla signifiers started developing catalepsy. Most the Bangla words had several meanings, depending upon context, and even contradictory meanings, as is now evident from the Bangiya Sabdakosh (1933), dictionary compiled by Haricharan Bandhyapadhya. Consequent upon alien intervention, the meanings of Bangla words were narrowed down to a few or even only one, and in several cases even change by colonial educators. Today a large number of Bangla words are explained with the help of English words. A huge lexical world at the social periphery simply vanished as the expressions were dubbed anchalik or non-metropolitan. Metropolitan Bangla flourished as language or literature articulated by upper caste Hindus, especially by the super-Brahmins of the 19th century, the gentry of Brahmosamaj. Our modernity emanated from colonisers’ values, and metropolitan Bangla evolved within those confines. Anchalik was tribal and lower-caste semiotic sphere. Similarly, words and expressions used in Muslim community were exuviated off metropolitan Bangla. The fund of words, diction, expressions were basically metropolitan till the emergence of the postmodern Bangla short story. That the language of the entire two hundred million people is the language of Bangla literature dawned quite late, when the Western rhetoric, poetics and canons became redundant and irrelevant.

From Bangadarshan onwards till the publication of the periodical Sabujpatra (1914) edited by Pramatha Choudhuri (1868-1946), son-in-law of Rabindranath’s elder brother Satyendranath Tagore (1842-1923), fictions were written in former old Bangla of letters, documents, verse, horoscopes etc., which was being articulated in flowery, Sanskritised, compounded, consonantal or vowel-blended words and long-winding sentences, beyond the reach of the uninitiated, so that the Brahminism of vocabulary could represent the fixity of power of the newly constructed individual. Pramatha Choudhuri was well versed in English and French languages and literatures, and had introduced triolet, terza rima, sonnet etc., colonial verse forms after he came back from England as a barrister. Sabujpatra gave prestige to spoken Bangla, i.e. the dialect spoken in and around the metropolis, which was the imperial capital till 1911. What had happened by the time Sabujpatra appeared was establishment of hundreds of jute mills in the same area, and convergence of a huge labour force from far-flung places who required a common medium of communication. A common medium of communication was also required by students from other provinces who came to the metropolis for studies at Hindu College (1817) and Calcutta University (1857). Sabu

Western canons, emanating out of anti-nature episteme, had far-reaching consequences on native Bangla life/world. Academicians such as Srikumar Bandhapadhya, Sashibhushan Dasgupta, Narayan Gangapadhya, Sisirkumar Das, Narendranath Chakraborty, Upendranath Gangapadhya, Haraprasad Mitra, Jagadish Bhattacharya and Bhudeb Choudhury have generally ignored native folk, tribal and indigenous Bangla grassroot discourses, but studded their books and articles with such alien signifiers as Iliad, Odyssey, Walter Scott, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Voltaire, Ralph Fox, Richard Burton, H.D. Bates, Elizabeth Bowden, Brander Matthews, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Van Wyck Brooks, Ernst Rhys, Dawson Scott, T. Seltyer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Balzac, D.L. Thomas, A. Symons, Samuel Johnson, L.B. William and even Encyclopedia Britannica, in order to enforce their arguments to create a stasis each for novel and short story. It was only after the emergence of academics of the new school of subaltern studies in 1982 that the short story broke out of universalism and talked of power not as homogenous and split, but as universally distributed in different ways, in different sites, among different social groupings.

The values that the definitions of stasis sustained are worth deconstruction. Here are a few (italics mine): ‘The novel deals with the individual, it is the epic of the struggle of the individual against society, against nature, and it could only develop in a society where the balance between man and society was lost, where man was at war with his fellows or with nature’ (Ralph Fox). ‘The short story fulfills the three unities of the French classical drama; it shows one action, in one place, on one day.

A short story deals with a single character, a single event, a single emotion, or the series of emotions called forth by a single situation’ (Brander Matthews). ‘The short story is an emphatically personal exposition. What one searches for and what one enjoys in a story is a special distillation, a unique sensibility which has recognised and selected at once a subject that, above all other subjects, is of value to the writer’s temperament and to his alonehis counterpart, his perfect opportunity to project himself’ (Sean O’Faolain). ‘Short story is an impressionistic prose tale, a short, effective, single blow, a moment of atmosphere, glimpse of a climactic incident’ (Fred Lewis Pattie). ‘A short story usually presents the crisis of a single problem,’ (Webster’s Dictionary and Encyclopedia). ‘A short story must contain one and only one informing idea, and that this idea must be worked out to its logical conclusion with absolute singleness of method’ (Hudson). ‘Brevity and natural limitation give the short story a precision as an Art, beside which the art of the novel seem rambling and formless. Standing as a single crystalline episode or experience, the short story bears, perhaps, the same relation to the novel as a single parable to the whole gospel’ (John Cournos). ‘The imagination of the savage and the child are partly of the same power and quality. They float in a world of wonder in which the wildest wishes become realities and the most impossible fancies wear the look of truth, especially when they are given form and substance by the art of the storyteller’ (Masterpiece of Short Stories). ‘If the novel is the record of the emotions of an individual soul, influenced by and influencing some other soul, one cannot have the novel until some notion of individuality has come to the world’ (Stoddard). ‘A short story is a short work of prose fiction, which typically either sets up and resolves a single narrative point or depicts a mood of an atmosphere’ (The Wordsworth Encyclopedia).

The above Occidental abstractions were accepted and given the garb of Oriental abstractions, despite the fact that the indigenous society had no such concepts as individuality, Art, masterpiece, single linearity, opposition to nature, etc. Academic insistence and critical acclaim forced Bangla short stories to have design, purpose, bounded form, totalization, originality, unilinear, monocentric, metaphysics, determinacy, etc. The author of the short story, in order to get canonised in Bangla literature, had to produce a work of art that knew no other rules but its own, aspire to and transform the crude contingency of worldly relations into purified aesthetic forms. The claim for universality had to be inherent in the text, although it had to be a highly specialised discourse called short story. Authors who were canonized post-Sabujpatra and up to Kallol (1932) are Dhurijati Prasad Mukhopadhya (1894-1961), Nareshchandra Sengupta (1883-1964) Manindralal Basu (1897-1986), Dineshchanra Das (1888-1941), Gokul Nag (1894-1925), Achintya Kumar Sengupta (1903-1975), Premendra Mitra (1904-1988), Buddhadeva Basu (1908-1974), Shailajananda Mukhopadhya (1901-1976), Tarashankar Bandapadhya (1898-1972), Saroj Kumar Roychoudhuri (1903-1972), Manik Bandapadhya (1908-1956), Annadashankar Ray (1904), Banaphool (1899-1979), and Bibhuti Bhushan Bandapadhya (1894-1950). Obviously, modernist critics have identified some of them as major, great, original, etc. However, literature till then had not been commodified and integrated into post-Independence Five-Year-Plan capitalism and bureaucratic culture.

The Occidental definitions were succinctly Orientalised in these words by Narayan Gangapadhya in his book Sahitya Chhotogolpo (1957): ‘Short story is an impression-born prose fiction whose one single message achieves totality through crisis of unity of a certain occurrence or a certain circumstance or a certain mentality.’ He characterized short story in three categories, i.e. Occurrence-centric, Character-centric and Essence-centric. These centres were further classified in twelve categories for the benefit of modernist critics: philosophical, social problem, questions or relations between man and woman, psychological, romantic, protagonist-based, allegorical, satirical, poetic, idealistic or political, supernatural, and strange.

Bhudeb Choudhury had in his Bangla Sahityer Chhotogolpo o Golpokar (1962) highlighted the following essential ingredients of a short story: a) at every moment, at every juncture, in endlessly spread, mysteriously complex modern lifesite lay unfathomable secret depths. A total reflection of this may be encountered at a single point of deeply absorbed fullness of life; b) second ingredient of short story is the densely close perceptive raptness of the author-artist—his meditative self-absorption in ongoing life. A single moment of total life should be reflectable in the mirror of that serene consciousness; c) thirdly, what is required is suggestiveness of the composition. A location, an emphasis, or emotion of special moment of a life which transcends life/world of all countries and times; d) in these ingredients specialties lies the incomparable specificity of short story. A story whose climax does not reveal complete perception of the moment of rootsource of the life-ocean, even if the story is brief in size, it is not a short story; it may be a tale, fable, parable or whatever. Therefore, in the creation of suggestiveness of eternal life within limited life’s climactic moment lies the form-style of short story.

Though the target readers of the articulations of Bangla academicians were graduate and postgraduate students as well as their teachers, the academic framework provoked authors to aim to abstract the world through structures of imaginative control to enable them to establish a position of detachment (nirlipta) from which they could survey the field of appearances, claim to have privileged perspective of absolute truth as a universalizing tool for accusing others of error. Content of the story was given much more importance by academicians rather than construction of the language. They were oblivious of the fact that languages of European fiction were several centuries old. Unfortunately none of the academicians discussed the semantic, semiotic, syntactic, lexical, dictional etc. attributes of short story, and neither did they correlate the text with the ethnic and social structures. There were several Bangla linguists but no language philosopher such as, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), or Theodore Adorno (1903-69); forget about our own Sanskrit language-sages of yore, namely, Anandavardhana (AD 850), Bhartihari (AD 450), or Bhoja (AD 1000). Pramatha Choudhuri pulled up the language structure from antiquity to modern, but modernist Bangla literature remained within the strict confines of metropolitan, sophisticated, elite-friendly language. The modernist academicians created and fabricated a pattern and went on excluding all those who did not fit into their scheme of things. They tried their best to impose a monocentric order. To them the world was an object of willed action, raw material for short story, guided and given form by the authors’ designs. Meaning and design had become one. The world itself had inconsequential meaning for them because they were artists (shilpi). They imposed sense and purpose. The process went on as authors emerged on the pages of Parichoi(1931), Kallol (1932) to post-Partition diasporic platform Notun Reeti (1958), the kingdom of indigenous gods and goddesses as Nature got blurred; sarthakata or significance and effectiveness could be traced when nature was de-animated in the text. The modern assumption of the world as chaos endowed the authors with a compulsion to make order solid, obligatory and reliably founded. A short story had to be confined within ordered form, within restricted time-space, to be certified as a short story. Chaos meant contingency and therefore modernists thought that chaos was the enemy of canons, of Art. Precolonial versified fictions and hagiographs were found to represent raw human condition (people were not constructed as individuals with the tools of Enlightenment), and therefore, contingent. Those premodern texts were found uncanonable, as they were disorderly, open-ended, irrational, spontaneous and nature-centric. Reviving the premodern, precolonial ethos and ethnos became a felt need for a large number of fresh authors who could realize that the modernist epistemic violence made man devoid of meanings. They realized that the Notun Reeti breed of post-Partition modernist fiction writers had become order suppliers of consumer products. Nevertheless, Notun Reeti and its fellow travellers did invent the technique of fiction writing in the language of the customers. This brand of modernist authors started producing twenty sleazy novels and a hundred short stories each year during Durga puja alone to mop up the bonuses of white-collar labourers. Partition was a devastating blow to the social and cultural values of ethnic West Bengal. The influx of refugees still continues, though now in driblets. In this erosion of values, and superimposition of a post-Partition diaspora on the ethnic life of West Bengal, lay the seeds of indigenous postmodern Bangla fiction.

Premodern Kalikshetra to Postmodern Kolkata

Like in any other language, Bangla literary modernism had its own contradiction between radical disruption of form and traditionalism of content and ideology, as were exhibited on the pages of such periodicals bulletins as Kalikalam (1926), Parichoi (1931), Kallol (1932), Chhotogolpo Notun Reeti (1958), Hungry Andolon (1961), Shastravirodhi (1966), mouthpiece Ei Dashok and Neem Sahitya (1967). Epistemic and ontological modernism had, however, arrived in Bangla literature first on the pages of Bangadarshan (1872) edited by Bankimchandra Chattapadhya (1838-1894) who had already written first ever Bangla prose fiction Durgeshnandini (1865). However, Bangla prose got its real semantic, semiotic and syntactic breakthrough on the pages of Sabujpatra (1914) edited by Pramatha Choudhuri (1868-1946). But the rise, youth and putrefaction of Parichoi properly maps literary modernism as well as birth of cultural grace, and its ultimate degeneration and cultural disgrace.

Notun Reeti was the last bastion of metropolitan upper-caste dominated quasi-Occidental canons. In fact, fiction, including adventure stories for children, continued to be written by them in the image of the colonial genre, where White Man’s Africa was Indianized in imagination to enable children of well-to-do families have Bangla indigenous feel of H. Rider Haggard, G.A. Henty or Henry Morton Stanley. Colonial adventure stories have spawned a new genre of Hindu religious adventure stories wherein the protagonist or author visits supposedly inaccessible pilgrim places, a strange metamorphosis of the colonial discourse in which fiction writer Avadhoot specialised and wrote innumerable volumes. Satya Guhu in his history of contemporary Bangla literature Ekaler Godyo Podyo Andoloner Dalil (1970) has stated that all Notun Reeti authors were anthologized in Ei Dashaker Golpo (1960) by Bimal Dar. The short story writers included in that anthology were all upper caste youth, with the majority of them being highest-category Brahmins: Ajay Dasgupta, Amalendu Chakraborty, Dibyendu Palit, Dipendra Nath Bandhapadhya, Mati Nandi, Jashodajiban Bhattacharya, Ratan Bhattacharya, Shankar Chattapadhya, Shirshendu Mukhopadhya, Shyamol Gangapadhya, Sandipan Chattapadhya, Somnath Bhattacharya and Samarjit Bandhapadhya. Some of them charted an unprecedented course of prolific writing, having written 400 novels and 5000 short stories, apart from duplicating Rider Haggard in equal number of books for children. Despite the command over their craft, the immediate postcolonial authors named above failed to produce texts comparable to those of Ben Okri, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’ O, Elechi Amadi, Ayi Kwei Armah, J. M. Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, Jamaica Kincaid and Neil Bissoondath. But then, Ngugi wa Thiong’O took six years to write Petals of Blood; Salman Rushdie took the same period to write Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things. There are other factors in the make-up of the authorial self as well. Firstly, the Indian polity had been co-opted into the colonial power structure through inauguration of Provincial Autonomy and formation of native ministry way back in 1936, a decade before Independence. Secondly, the refugee writers knew nothing about and had no experience of indigenous rural West Bengal, the inexplicable panorama so vividly displayed by Bibhuti Bhushan Bandhapadhya (1894-1950) and Tarashankar Bandhapadhya (1898-1971). Fiction writer Shyamol Gangapadhya did purchase farmland and lived village-life for a feel of the ethnicity but was not accepted into the weave of the place by the locals.

Managed, written, defined and canonised within urban middle class values, Parichoi, Kollol, Pragati, etc. periodicals identified themselves with the Occidental canons and discourse whereas Notun Reeti adopted a mode of counter-identification by staying within the governing structure of above ideas, with a mix of Soviet discourse in case of some authors, but by nativising the terms. They combined aesthetic self-consciousness and formalist experimentation. The left-sympathisers among them tried to combine what they thought was social realism, though according to the Soviet definition social realism meant a dialectical interpretation of reality and its criterion in light of the needs and aims of an evolving socialist society. However, gradually lucre became their main driving force. For most of them lucre became the best mode to reroot them on the soil of West Bengal. The Neem Sahitya, Hungryalist and the Shastravirodhi literary movements attempted to go beyond the structure of oppositions and sanctioned negations of the discourse through disidentification. They located themselves in essentially adversarial relations to the prevalent aesthetic realism. Thereafter the post-Naxalite little magazine explosion-activated extrication of the discourse, as a result of which aesthetic realism completely collapsed; there was gradual deconstruction and dissolution of high and subaltern cultural distinction. This became more pronounced in films. Evacuation of commitment pervaded all spheres of Bangla life/world, and protean postmodern cultural politics emerged. So much so that an erstwhile Naxalite started fleecing Marwari businessmen at the Income Tax Office to bring out special issues of his periodical in order to honour a couple of left-leaning poets.

The vernacular news dailies which started newspaper literature (Narayan Gangapadhya had termed it magazinist literature) are actually Bangla tabloids which thrive on front page sensationalisations of rape, murder, collective lynching, kidnapping, gang wars, elite brothels, etc., as if these are the only events taking place in West Bengal. No comparison can be made with English news dailies. The readerships are poles apart. Each vernacular daily has its own collegium of captive geniuses, and mainly their books are reviewed and hoisted on manipulated bestseller lists. Such bestsellers are declared to be landmarks–an imperial concept to grab other peoples’ lands. There are authors who write Leninist stories on the pages of the Communist Party newspaper, and Mills & Boon stories on the pages of consumerist dailies. Krittibas (1953), which started as a parallel poetry magazine to Notun Reeti fiction, produced frighteningly money-spinning potboiler fiction writers, outsmarting the Harold Robinses. Jyotirmoy Datta, the ultra-rightist member of Krittibas, teamed up with ultra-leftist revolutionary Azizul Haque in order to bring out a tabloid. Amid this funniest of cultural intramurality, some authors emerged as ex-Naxalites who reportedly were anti-Naxal informers of the Police establishment!

Modernist discourse and discursive practices, irrespective of whether they arrived with the British rulers or through glossy Soviet despatches, legitimised Occidental canons and hegemony. Canons, aesthetic or military, imply legitimization. Destruction of the Bamian Buddhas is legitimization of homocentric canon. It is against nature. It thinks that the rainbow does not have so many colours. Rabindra Guha, who does not have any roots permanently like an arborescent, has articulated the dangerous consequences of a peculiar cow-belt hegemony in his micro-narrative Contactile. The little magazine explosion I have been talking of was postmodernist rupture from modernist discourse and encirclement of the centre by periphery. Two thousand fiction writers are sustained by six hundred periodicals within and outside West Bengal. This excludes magazines published in Bangladesh as well as Web little magazines. In an epoch having two thousand living fiction writers—several of them write postmodern poems–proliferation of new forms, diction, semiotic and syntactic practices, wordplay, spaces and experiences, is bound to push the Bangla short story beyond any conceivable frame. Canonical disarray was inevitable. It is not possible to bind some texts within academically-defined genres.

It would be interesting to note that when the Indian nationalist leaders in their anti-imperialist discourse gave a call for Civil Disobedience (1932) and Quit India (1942) movements, they did not advise writers to disobey and quit colonial canons. It took three earth-moving literary movements, lives of thousands of Naxal intellectual youth, jails of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and putrescence of Establishment Marxists to get rid of them. Thereafter it was plenitude of the multivocal, unprecedented freedom for the author, subversion of academic dictats. And propensities of parataxis, nonlinearity, hybridity, rhizomatic, syncreticity, heterogeneity, openness, playfulness, irony, aptativeness, disjunction, displacement, immanence, fragmentation, disorientation, disruption, hagiographical, indigenous, talkative folk forms, subaltern, eco-feminism etc. became widespread in the fictions published in little magazines. This phenomena has drawn the wrath of modernist critics who have been selectively castigating authors. However, they are aware that postmodernism is the only umbrella beneath which such a diverse discourse may be brought together for a unifying congregation.

Despite such subversive and multivocal texts of the literary movements being eventually subsumed into the mainstream, even if selectively, based on political, media-centric, upper caste or post-Partition diasporic inclinations, the challenge has permanently affected the way the postgeneric has impacted the present, and will impact the future, discourse, as has already been experienced in the case of certain Hungryalist and Shastravirodhi fiction writers like Basudeb Dasgupta and Ramanath Ray. Any literary defiance embodies the provocation of a literary code into socio-cultural, or tangentially, political code. Understanding of a postmodern text’s interpellated and interpetalled designs definitely entails active collaboration on readers’ part. The reader, the reader-as-critic, cannot afford to take his own position as granted, since certain problems will always remain unresolved at his own level. Any interpretation of a text will depend on the reader’s understanding of the macro and micro cultural constructions and the socio-political givenness it was written from.

The postmodern Bangla short story generally aspires to resist memory’s appropriation technique of vernacular newspaper literature or of textbook history, as the narrative proceeds mapping out counter-hegemonic strategies and obeys a memory-triggered structure in which textual swings develop ethnic elasticity. Postmodern short stories are worlds away from the metafictive self-consciousness of Parichoi-Kallol-Pragati and Notun Reeti authors, who gave primacy to the one single voice. Certain postmodern stories are a polyphonic mélange which need not be seen as productive of meaning but necessarily reflective or expressive. There are still some academicians who humiliate their graduate and postgraduate students if they are unable to locate the produced meaning of a text. Evidently, the discourses are basically plural, and there can never be a monocentric correctness as demanded by modernist critics.

It is pertinent to note that during the Emergency when Indira Gandhi suspended fundamental rights of the individual, and texts were subjected to censorship, several authors adopted a secret slyness in their fictions to enable the narrative to speak in different voices from behind textual masks in order to de-structure and deconstruct the centre of power. During the last decade of the 20 th century, in certain semi-urban and rural areas of West Bengal, ravaged by political violence, authors are forced to employ this technique to rescue language and literature from the terrorizing stasis around them.

As a result of the culture of political violence, villagers affiliated to one political party are hounded out of their ancestral hearth and farmland forever, or till the balance tilts, by villagers affiliated to the locally powerful or ruling political party, something unimaginable during premodern/precolonial and modern/colonial days. Such values are completely alien to West Bengal where Muslim farmers never fought with each other. However, the postmodern feature is that such violence and terror have got nothing to do with Marxist and Gandhian ideologies that the parties brag about. All ideologies, commitment and virtue have withered away. Loyalties can be switched at will, one’s own or someone else’s. Though in their youth in 1950s they had shouted Yeh azadi jhutha hai (Frantz Fanon in 1961 called it ‘the farce of national independence’) on the streets, the now-bloated top bosses of political outfits do not appear to be seriously bothered about present smithereening of West Bengal’s ethnic life/world, of people who have lived together since thousands of years. As a result of political violence, the subject (just a digit to the State) is territorially deappropriated; his forefather’s land has become a recognizable locus for incessantly unresolved problems. And this is one of the subject-positions where postmodern Bangla textual reality develops as a complexity. In Tripura the division is between tribals and non-tribals where the violence is defined by ruthless firepower.

Certain dominating media networks have their maximum security prisons of authorial world of customer-friendly consumerist language, which have been subverted by the micro-narratives of such authors as Udayan Ghosh, Atindriya Pathak, Barin Ghoshal, Subimal Basak, Ajit Ray, Kamal Chakraborty, Mrinal Banik, Samir Basu, Tarak Rej, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Manab Chakraborty, Bhagirath Mishra, Abhijit Sen, Subimal Mishra, Prasun Bandhopadhya. Arupratan Basu, Subhas Ghosh and Abani Dhar. Fluidity of their micro-narratives undermine the logic of power; the reader is forced to unravel the intertextuality and the power-structure that weave subject-positions within societal complexities. The subject refuses to be a digit. Their texts undermine the readers’ search for a fixed subject-identity through semantic, semiotic and syntactical flux. The texts function as filter as well as amplifier of suppressed voices and fragmented undefinable subjectivities. The narrative involves the reader in the textual problems of the story which resist creating modernist stereotypes. As a result the identities, instead of getting lost in the quagmire of fixity, engage themselves in perpetual remaking.

Titles of postmodern Bangla short story go beyond logocentric modernist norms to metonyms of plurality. It may be intentional or unconscious. Instead of calling them ‘titles’, it would be ontologically and historically proper to call them ‘rubric’. Prior to the invasion of colonialism, nature could never be owned by a native of West Bengal, be it land, water surface or forests. There were no concepts of title, title holder, deed, registration, rights, will, probate, affidavit, advocate, dalil, sastavej, wakil, wakalatnama, tauji, mauja, jameendari, shariq, munim, mukhtar, peshkar, etc. pertaining to ownership of nature or dispute relating thereto. All these words were alien to Bangla ethos and ethnos; they did not and do not have Bangla synonyms. These concepts were aimed at containing land, flora and fauna, subordinating them to human will, and rendering nature’s infinititude into computable minims. It was settlement and seizure of Bangla territory through language.

Bangla nature represented, in innumerable forms, gods and goddesses. Even Buddhism was forced to have gods and goddesses. Today, most of the political violence in villages erupt out of disputes relating to ownership of farmland, orchards or water surfaces. Land reforms have reached a dead end as fragmentation of land has crossed limits. There is now no scope to absorb the surplus farmers in cultivation. No industries have come up to absorb them either. Rather, the majority of those that already existed, especially those owned by indigenous people of West Bengal, have either been struck off through alien ontology or locked off by disgusted entrepreneurs. Rural areas swarm with illiterate, unemployed farmhands while urban and semi-urban areas swarm with educated unemployeds, fifty years after Independence and twenty-five years of quasi-Marxist rule. Several of the authors have been groomed in this postmodern condition. A strange post-Industrial scenario indeed! Time packaged in a coffin!

In premodern Bangla, oral or written narrative was nature’s gift to mankind of this specific geography. The text was not the private property of the writer. In fact, the concept of author itself arrived with Occidental poetics. The premodern writer did not have authority over the text prepared by him. In case of some Mangalkavyas, the writer claimed that a particular god directed him in his dreams. Even as late as 1970, Komol Kumar Majumdar has written almost all his stories after obeisance to his personal deities in the first sentence of his texts, which he ethnicised in an incomparable discourse based on premodern semantic, semiotic and syntactic nuances.

In case of premodern writers, any subsequent writer was free to add his own contribution to anybody else’s texts, or change the entire structure of the earlier narrative. Valmiki’s epic Ramayana has hundreds of versions in various Indian languages. All of them are accepted at all levels of the particular language-society. Nabaneeta Dev Sen in her essay The Hero’s Feet of Clay (2000) has cited women’s re-tellings of the epic, dating from 16 th century to the present day.

Prior to invasion of modernity, there was personal possession in Bangla life/world, and no idea of private property existed. The concept of ownership of text created violence in native philosophy, society and culture. No text had a title in premodern Bangla literature, and the writer was not at all a title-holder author. Title meant seizure and fixity. Title identified the center of power. Titles of narratives arrived with Occidental poetics, and became inseparable from the center of power of the content during Porichoi-Kollol-Notun Reeti span. The title identified the core of the subject matter. Since the title-holder or the author owned the text, the entry and the exit of the text had to be securely closed. Hence the twist of the key in the last para or thereabouts of a story became essential to keep the exit-door of the story carefully clicked shut. The close-endedness of a text was perfected with imperialism’s foray into indigenous unowned cultures.

Political internecine violence may also be interpreted as emergence of a tool to reopen indigenous cultures, be it in West Bengal, Tripura or African countries. Naxal violence in West Bengal, and fragmentation of this school of thought into thirty-six warring camps, had gone beyond political domain. In fact, the efforts of Hungryalist, Shastravirodhi and Neem Sahitya fiction writers to dismantle the single core of the subject matter, were carried further by writers who emerged after the above fragmentation. The gol gappo sndrome became limited to newspaper literature. The postmodern fiction writer employs rubric instead of title, as an external unifier of his narrative thoughts, as a measure of decentering, and for the purpose of highlighting the periphery. With emphasis on the periphery, the focus of the text shifts to micro-territory of characters. However, the micro-territory remains increasingly plagued by neo-colonial ills; economic disorder, social malaise, political scams, criminal as politician, government corruption, influx of famished Bangladeshi Muslim families, repression by state and political party apparatuses, digitalisation of individuals as voters, indifference and apathy of public sector institutions. The progressive time of modernity has evaporated in thick polluted air. Amid this hypochondria, the postmodern texts are forced to probe their own narrative ways out of the disillusion. There are authors who have declared in print that they do not own copyright of their books.

Not having a title and title-holder, the postmodern text has evolved ability to be both of specific micro-territory and yet also peregrinated. In its tension between the micro and the macro, local and non-local, particular and general, between domestic and public environs of characters, there is constant rubrification of identity. The alterity of the text is constructed on the principle of self-difference rather than as a self-identical whole. A postmodern mixture has taken place after the indigenous communes of West Bengal were overrun by influx of displaced persons from East Pakistan, leading to titlelessness of micro-cultures, micro-rituals, micro-customs, etc., and interweaving thereof in pluralistic discourses. A rubric emancipates postmodern Bangla short story from the major colonial anchorage of history. Titlelessness attacks ossification of text as art, and avoids commodification. Since postmodernism is mobile and on the random nomadic move, title of the text is an impossiblity, superimposed and artificial.

From premodern to postmodern Bangla literature has moved quite fast, much faster than Europeans. Language developmen, however, has not been able to keep same pace. The geographical space called Kalikshetra, spanning from Behala in the north to Dakshineshwar in the south, was handed over to Rai Majumdar Lakshmikanta Choudhury for raising revenue from the produce of the area vide a 1608 order of Emperor Nooruddin Muhammed Jehangir. Only people of subaltern castes viz. heley kaivarta, jeley kaivarta, namashudra, mahishya, sadgop, rajvangshi, poundra-kshatriya, etc., lived and toiled in the villages of the area. Not a single upper-caste family lived in Kalikshetra. Lakshmikanta, a Brahmin, built his residence on the outskirts of Behala. Kalikshetra became Calcutta when the descendents of Lakshmikanta, better known as Sabono Choudhury, were forced by the then Nawab of Bengal to transfer intermediacy and revenue rights to the East India Company in 1698. Premodern Kalikshetra became modern Calcutta. The original subaltern inhabitants were driven out, and in came hordes of middle-caste business families to seize upon new business opportunites. And with the transfer of Diwani Rights in Bengal to the Englishmen in 1765 and establishment of Fort Wiliam College in 1800, the entry of upper-caste families to the area became unstoppable. Modern Calcuta became postmodern Kolkata in 2001, as all original inhabitants, both premodern and modern, have been hounded out of the hub of the metropolis.

There are at least six hundred Bangla little magazines throughout West Bengal and Tripura, apart from those in other states of India and in other countries. Though the West Bengal government wants them to be registered, a real little magazine, by its very nature, cannot be registered. Lifespan and number of issues of most of the magazines are negligible, varying between one-issue, one-time affair to irregular issues continuously for forty years. But shelf-life in certain cases are incomprehensible, much more than large number of books published each year. This has led to a little magazine library boom and connoisseurs collecting specific issues. Subrata Rudra and Satya Guha are reported to be using their collections as beds and sofa sets after placing covers on them due to lack of space. None of the governmental institutions, including national and state libraries, Shahitya and Bangla academies or universities have any arrangements or inclination to preserve such a huge micro-cultural production. The job was taken up in 1978 by an individual, Sandip Dutta, who started a Little Magazine Library and Research Center at Tamer Lane, and has filled up his entire family home with innumerable little magazines, being received by him almost every working day.

This phenomenon of little magazine explosion, and the scope for their preservation, has been a major contributory factor in the proliferation of postmodern Bangla short stories. In a way the magazines embody the flux of Bangla reality and relativity, and contest centers of authority and imposed canons in their own sphere. The ethics of the postmodern is that little is better than big. Little magazines are micro-level power formations. Micro forms, because they are so unhindered by rules and contexts, and therefore so open to so many indefinite interconnections, are superior to totalising macro-forms. Until the little magazine phenomenon exploded, Bangla literature was controlled and canonised by a Kolkata-based governing class, despite the tremendous subaltern impact of Hungryalists and anti-canon war cry of Neem Sahitya and Shastravirodhies. Little magazines keep themselves activated as a decentering process. The fringes of urban and semi-urban locales, as well as rural West Bengal, swarm with the culturally dispossessed, and most of the little magazine editors and their contributors come from such social segments.

Six hundred little magazines, ranging from the sixteen-page Sahitya Setu edited by Jagabandhu Kundu to the four-hundred page Bibhab edited by Samarendra Sengupta, fortnightly to annually, edited by innocent teenagers to experienced eighty-year-olds. And two thousand fiction writers. Most the magazines publish both poetry and short stories, and even novels and drama. However, certain magazines exclusively publish short stories and analytical essays relating thereto, such as Tibra Kutha, Golpo Guccha, Ubudas, Anyabhumi, Notun Golpo, Golper Kagoj, Golpo Mela, Anarjo Sahitya, Sahasrabdo, Golpo Sarani, Anya Golpo, Golpo Ekhoni Dibaratrir Kabya, etc.

When the little magazines started appearing one by one, initially they were mouthpieces of particular groups trying to do something new, and members of one group were not allowed entry into another group. There were group rivalries and muck-raking for some time. But these flimsy screen covers broke down quickly as it dawned on the editors that an exclusive serious readership has emerged devoted to little magazine literature, and that little magazines were no more stepping-stones for lucre-sniffing, aspirant authors. They were enabled to accept heterogeneity of Bangla life, and recognize its syncreticity. The little magazine groups realised that for them there was no more space for collectively negotiated and collectively proclaimed rules and canons; no more manifestoes, group actions, brotherhood of ideas, joining forces and closing ranks like in earlier literary movements. Now the world of little magazines itself was called The Little Magazine Movement. Contributors were free to write in any magazine they preferred. Samaras Dasgupta, associated with this new phenomenon, established a Chotto Golpo Academy at Asansol.

In the above perspective, magazines exclusively devoted to the short story became a necessity in order to publish narratives with their foci upon the centrifugal tendencies of current social transformations and their dislocating character; narratives that saw the self as dissolved or dismembered by the fragmenting of experience; narratives that understood current transitions in epistemic terms or as dissolving epistemology altogether; narratives that regarded co-ordinated political engagement as precluded by the primacy of contextuality and dispersal, especially after Naxalite failure and subsequent disillusionment created by a senile Left Establishment; narratives that articulated the powerlessness of the Bangla individual digitalized as a voter; narratives that handled terrors of urban life and totalization of rural life as a result of the nerve-shattering intrusions of abstract systems. Of its own, the short story went beyond modernist confines. The magazines were not bound by any market or had to face such pressures as public demand. They broke free from, and de-created, the prisons of inherited words, dictions, syntax, forms and stories in order to discover fresh realities. They helped cross-fertilizations of the narrative voice by enabling authors to employ contrastive merging of standard language and local dialects. They allowed free play of historicism as a means of destabilizing orthodoxies of micro-level patriarchies. They nursed construction of sentences without the use of verbs, and intermixture of elite diction with subaltern expressions. They gave full freedom to authors to interpolate analepsis and dexis within the story as frequently as the author preferred.

However, the craft was not as easy for the little magazine authors as it appeared to be. It was very difficult for an author to get rid of the fictional reinforcements supplied by the ruins of the colonial academic system lorded over by quasi-Marxist babudom, wherein metaphysical positions from Greek to Cartesian philosophy laid traps at every step. But the little magazines have tried to dismantle the suzerainty of time, the Western phantom framework within which most short story anthologies are confined. Instead, they have re-installed space, as a result of which one gets opportunities to read stories written by authors who do not vagabond around newspaper offices and coffee-house tables at Kolkata, as they reside far away from the metropolis and do not write much. The academic jargon called ‘art’ is relevant only in time and irrelevant in space. Installation of space proves the hollowness of the popularity of oft-repeated names, which in time are marketable brands, uncalled for in little magazine world, where feel good (as in feeling good about a story) is not the measure of analysis of text.

The semiotics of mapping as an actual expression and fulfillment of forms of Kolkata-centric metropolitan domination make the imagined, conceptual and geographical spaces of little magazines very important. The little magazine which could define such a spaceimagined, conceptual and geographicall combined in Ishpater Chithi, published from what is called the Rahr area, covering the mining and industrial belt of Asansol, Durgapur, Kulti, Chittaranjan, etc. Edited by Prithwish Chakraborty, the magazine published 714 ethnico-spatial short stories between 1971-1999 which created possibilities of discursive self-determination at the periphery. The Kolkata-centric system of literary power authorizes certain representations to proliferate, makes every effort to block, prohibit and invalidate the representations of fiction writers of the Rarh area. For example, those associated with Ishpater Chithi, such as Udayan Ghosh, Biman Chattapadhya, Birendranath Shasamal, Moti Mukhopadhya, Prodip Das Sharma, Samaresh Dasgupta, Rabindra Guha, Nanda Choudhury, Manab Chakraborty, Pratim Sarkar, Mrinal Banik, Ashok Tanti, Prafulla Kumar Singha, Parthajit Bhakta, Arunkumar Chattapadhya, and Subrata Mukhopadhya. The Kolkata-centric literature have been constructing a heavily circumscribed system of images and categories of thought for which the non-metropolitan ethnic-spatial discourse not only creates cultural and political threats, but even may be seen as an attack on the vernacular market and customer values.

Kolkata-centric metropolitan language has evolved a metropolitan culture, which has negligible connectedness with micro-level Bangla life. Micro-level dialects, which non-metropolitan authors have interjected into their texts, are replete with cultural meanings. Metropolitan language spawns non-ethnic cultural attitudes. The majority of postmodern fiction writers do not contribute to periodicals which are not little magazines, do not get their books reviewed other than in little magazines. Almost all short story magazines have their own publication wing. The short story collections published by them in limited editions are sold generally at district-level annual book fairs and a few avant-garde outlets like Shilalipi near Kalighat at Kolkata. These outlets function as spaces where micro-level counter-discourses get knitted into a pluralist discourse; spaces which are outside the power belt of metropolitan, centrist, homogenizing episteme. All little magazines are actually the inbetween spaces which carry the burden of the meanings of Bangla culture. Such spaces are momentary and impermanent by nature, but are continuously engaged in re-inventing themselves, a reality of complex web of relationships that cut across gender, religion, caste, class, dialect, geography and generations. A few little magazines even have their own small printing press, such as Mahadiganta. The cultural space of six hundred Bangla little magazines is a vast, borderless region with their own discourses and discursive practices which circulate without definable boundaries.

The increase in the number of little magazines and non-commercial fiction writers have led to a pastiche of the colonial genre of short story. The narrative structure is called anu golpo or micro-story. Since the conclusive twist had been made essential by modernist short story writers and academicians, the anu golpo or micro-story made fun of the colonial genre by articulating only the twist and making the rest of the narrative irrelevant. There is no build-up to the ultimate twist or a linearity ending up in last-minute shock to prove universality of human discourse, the doctrine of eternal truth floated by monocentric, imperialist, totalitarian epistemes. Anu golpo is different from the incident-oriented, brief short stories which fiction writer Bonophul mastered. Anu golpo dismantles the modernist definition of short story. The text disorders the order so that the reader is reminded that experience cannot be accurately reconstructed and reproduced. The speed and scope of the text are extremely rapid and hyperkinetic. It is a text for the very reason that it know itself as text.

De-narrativisation and De-canonisation

…short stories which started appearing exclusively on the pages of little magazines in the aftermath of the three movements (Hungryalist, Shastravirodhies and Neem Sahitya), more and more interjected micro-level dialects spoken in West Bengal, disproving the centrist metropolitan myth of universalism, as they staged discourses to the voices of those constituted as the Other. Their emphasis shifted on articulating the multi-ethnic margins of West Bengal. It was a matter of taking hold of hitherto unnoticed, actual micro-level cultural power, of the language, systems of metaphors and regimes of images that the modernist authors designed to silence in their fictions. The modernists, including Samaresh Basu (1924-1988), who himself rose from non-metropolitan slum and worked as a Communist Party activist among jute mill workers, rested his fictions, even when he strayed into magazinist, consumer-friendly populism, upon the ethico-discursive principle of usurping the signifying and representing functions of the margins, overriding their hybrid, pluralist, multicultural and non-universal reality.

The three literary movements had provided a cultural riposte to the modernist imagination of a unified destiny of mankind, an imagination which expunged particular and local narratives in its drive towards universal rationalization and technological progress. The post-movement fictions went beyond the riposte. The authors were confronted with a reality in which those who talked against the concept of private property had started on a spree of owning nursery schools, nursing homes, buildings, bungalows, cinema halls, cold storages, taxies, buses, trucks, etc.; criminals were selling utopia, peddling status quo; village bosses were stealing electricity; roadside villages were mushrooming with midnight robbers; non-Bangla criminal ghettoes were frighteningly increasing in urban centers; Tagore’s Vishwabharati and Santiniketan were in spiritual ruins; 40 per cent of Kolkata people were living in dirtiest shanty slums; political outfits were redefining ‘slums’, ‘starvation death’, ‘crime’, ‘lockup death’, ‘proletariat’, etc. through lexical maneuvers; helpless, people were resorting to lynching of anti-socials due to connivance of politicians with criminal elements. The final blow came when the eyes donated by the Marxist thinker and an architect of land reform, Binoy Choudhury, were allowed to rot in a flask after removing them at his death.

In the above hyper-real scenario, the text of fictions started getting inextricably entangled in the lives of their characters, in their interpellated matrix of identification, and in the conflation of the multiplicity of the narrator himself/herself. They carefully nurtured a bifocal vision of human experience, resulting into an obsession with the provisional, which has been identified as one of the defining characteristics of postmodern literature. Such narratives emanated from a disruptive temporality of enunciation as opposed to the homogenous serial time, highlighting the tensions between multifariousness and homogeneity.

However, during the post-movement periods, even till the end of 20 th century certain fictions maintained an abstracted stasis that had been nursed by progenies of post-Partition diasporic families who thought that in the bourgeois/proletariat binary, they were on the proletariat side, which logically led to the absurd conclusion that every ethnic middle-class West Bengali was bourgeois, and therefore, the geographic and cultural space should be blamed. Though it has petered out now, there had been a bloom of blame fictions, an instrumental textuality through which the author or the narrator created a non-blamable, sanctimonious position for himself, living within the protection of the fixation. When the reader removed the palimpsest layers of the short story, he/she encountered a situation in which what was absent became as important as what was there; encountered an ambivalent geographical and temporal location; an intersection of narrative, autobiography and immediate history. These short stories transformed the narrative to almost a snapshot of counter-biography or assemblage of broken mirror-memoir. Little magazines which functioned as platforms for such short stories were Dandwashook, Manusher Baccha, Bijnapan Parba, Shobdo Shabdik, etc., and the writers were Robin Ghosh, Sumantra Chattapadhya, Sisir Guha and others.

The most influencing factor for the stunted growth of prose has been Sagarmoy Ghosh, the editor of weekly Desh, who had the knack to identify the growing literary market segments and the upcoming fiction writers who had the potential to write in the language of the consumer. He picked up such authors when young, and blazoned them relentlessly on readers who remain glued only to vernacular newspapers. We do not yet have prose writers comparable to Fyodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William Burroughs, Salman Rushdie or Gunter Grass.
The articulation of the margins has taken different forms in the fictions of women writers as their struggle is an ongoing process to find a form of self-definition. Theirs is not the obedient reproduction of patriarchal paranoid projections; rather it is simultaneous arguments to focus on the need for careful deconstruction of the very structures of dominant and marginal. Bangla fictions was initiated by Bankimchandra Chattapadhya with the placing of a female at the center of the discourse of Durgeshnandini (1865), which he continued in subsequent novels Kapalakundala, Mrinalini, and Devi Choudhurani. The first Bangla short story Madhumati (1873), written by Bankim’s brother Purnachandra Chattapadhya, also had a female at the center of the discourse. However, with the stranglehold of colonial modernity, the center of Bangla fiction became an irreplaceable Hindu male upper class domain.

Colonial modernity represented an effort to synthesize its progressive and emancipatory ideals into universalizing integrating narrative of the Hindu male individual’s place in history and society, and took it for granted that there existed a Hindu male legitimate center, an ostensibly superior and unchallengeable position from which controls are established and hierarchies determined. The domination of the center expressed itself in fictions as a linguistic subordination of every grammatical person to the upper-caste Hindu male called ‘hero.’ The premodern vision had a duality of two-in-one while placing the female prior to male, such as in Sita-Ram, Radha-Krishna, Laila-Majnu, Savitri-Satyavan, etc. Fiction by women writers had emerged through the family magazine Bharati (1879) edited by Rabindranath Tagore’s elder brother Dijendranath (1840-1926) and subsequently by his sister Swarnakumari Devi (1855-1932).

Swarnakumari Devi’s fictions preceded the all-pervading influence of Rabindranath Tagore and could therefore retain premodern literary values for which modernist academician Srikumar Bandhapadhya claimed that they were full of defects. She was much closer to the values of pre-colonial pregeneric rhymed fictions and hagiographs which used to be organized in an open-endedness inherent in the plurality of the ethnic space and religion, and were obviously considered as messy by the British colonialists. Consequently, post-Tagore fictions were packed in closed structures in tight and neat patterns to give them self-contained, self-sufficient and almost ineffable character. The premodern, pre-colonial texts had the capacity to sustain worlds. The motifs and devices employed in her fictions could not be catalogued by modernist critics to securely identify a genre, as their variations went beyond modernist stylistic regularity.

The first generation of women short story writers, Saratkumari Chaudhurani (1861-1920), Sharaladevi (1872-1945), Madhurilata (1886-1918), Indira Devi (1879-1922), Anurupa Devi (1882-1958) and Nirupama Devi (1883-1951), were groomed in the familial mirror image of European Enlightenment. Right from the very beginning, there had been a difference between language memories of women and men writers. Modernist male authors’ stories, including Shastravirodhi fiction, have been structured as quest narratives detailing the protagonist’s or author’s solitary progress through a maze of obstacles and difficulties, and are eventual triumphant emergence as a linguistically and culturally competent subject. This linear journey became more focused right through Pramatha Choudhury’s (1868-1946) intellectual individuality, Sailajananda Mukhopadhya’s (1901-1976) instinctive individuality, Samaresh Basu’s (1924-1988) internal individuality, to the author of Bonshi Baigar Abhishek Kanai Kundu’s (1935) avant garde individuality. On the contrary, women writers’ stories have had a less linear plot, and their protagonists have been less alone, as was evidenced in the fictions of women writers of subsequent generation such as Shanta Devi (1893-1984), Sita Devi (1895-1974), Shailabala Ghoshjaya (1894-1973) and Prabhavati Devi Saraswati (1905-1972). Generally, the most significant events or turning points of their texts involved the construction of meaningful relationships with others. Intersubjectivity, rather than just subjectivity, has been the cultural preoccupation of women writers. Nevertheless, women writers generally were socialized to metropolitan femininity prior to Mahashweta Devi. Incidentally, I do not find any women writer in the anthology Golpo Shaat Shottor (1987), i.e., Stories from the Sixties and Seventies, edited by Uttam Das. There was no woman poet of fiction writer in the Hungryalist, Shastravirodhi and Neem Sahitya movements.

…Postmodern women fiction writers employ trialectic of space, time and social being. Anuradha Gupta articulates an ecological ethics of alterity while in Jyotsna Karmakar’s stories, space is fundamental to the form of the commune and exercise of its power. Doli Dutta’s stories enter into and echo postmodernist discourse as they, in stages, deconstruct notions of reason, knowledge and subjectivity. Alpana Ghosh interpolates assmeblages through ruptured texts which facilitates proliferation of meanings, resultinginto spread of narrative energy in various trajectories, mainly postcolonial transvaluation of political, economic and social spaces plagued by disillusion. In case of certain women writers such as Shorni Pandey, Tilottoma Majumdar, Yashodhara Raychaudhuri, Rama Karmakar, Arati Kahali Goswami, Jaya Mitra, Jaya Goala, Meenakshi Sen, Madhuri Lodh, Anita Rana, Sudeshna Chakraborty and Neeta Biswas, their discursive practices open up venues of liberation aspirations, simultaneously stimulating their perfomative agenda for activating an altogether different vision. Stories written by them expose and reveal the shortcomings and dominance of mainstream literary values, undermines patriarchal cultural beliefs, and aspires to dismantle the very patriarchal Occidental orthodoxy of the genre. On the flip side, Ahana Biswas and Anita AgnihotriAhana is a Viswa Bharati-educated academic and Anita is a bureaucratexplore tensions and contradictions that are generated when micro-level discourses exploit the dominant structures to expose the secret and unspoken happenings within mainstream forms. As a form it creates opportunities to tell the untold, beyond traditional Bangla womanliness, and at the same time avoid Westerns feminist discourses. As a challenge to the status quo, both social and generic, articulation of the untold and the alternative, affects the dominant orthodoxy, and spawns fresh possibilities of producing new meanings.

…Postmodern short stories by women writers get interwoven in their semantic, semiotic and syntactic aspirations in a fashion that disrupt the decorous hierarchy of colonial literary genres implanted in Bangla literature by modernist upper caste male authors, and insisted upon by modernist critics and academicians, and even by the patriarchs of such para-academic institutions as publishing or broadcasting or journalism. Since the commercial, consumer-friendly magazinist literature, a colonial derivative, continue to be dominated by lucre-driven male editors, women writers have to continuously face the trap of modernist male derivativeness, a violence that a centrist, universalizing, hegemonist, patriarchal episteme does to its victims. There would be tremendous pressure on women writers to write like certain popular male fiction writers. Nevertheless, with substantial increase of women writers in the younger generation, one may assume that such pressures would be limited only to a few women who try to keep the patriarchs in good humour. Some of the branded feminist authors are in fact sponsored by literary patriarchs.

Compared to postmodern fiction by young women writers, such fictions by young men adopt strategies of portraying present Bangla nightmare that are curt and ruthless because of the anarchism they are forced to carry in a politically directionless scenario. Women writers explore social evils as manifestations of socio-cultural contradictions, and such explorations are more explicit in the fictions of Barak Valley, Tripura and West Bengal’s nonmetropolitan authors. However, almost all authors of the newer generation adopt complex interpretative strategies by rejecting the parameters of modernist definitions of short story, excepting for the magazinist writers, of course, who resort to the language of the consumer. Their postmodern texts are not all engaged in documentation, or in what avant-garde writers used to call ‘creative writing’, or what the diasporic leftists called chronicles of social reality.

Disentitlement and Metastasis: Muslim Writers

Postmodern texts of Bangla Muslim authors of West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley of Assam demand a very close reading and re-reading., as the articulations record opaque ecstasies and secret anguishes transformed into narrative power, while forces and fluxes of writer’s pre-colonial Islamic palimpsest memory are projected into the experiences of an apparently secular present. The texts may conceal tortured convergence of several tangential, parallel and divergent elements. The authors share the vulnerability of the Other. Here they are poles apart from Bangladeshi authors. The Hindu authors in Bangladesh are the Other.

…Bangla Muslim fiction writers were conspicuous by their absence for almost two decades after Independence, as the metropolitan creamy layer of the community departed for East Pakistan. The potential authors and the readers simply vanished. Emergence of an educated middle-class took some time. Even the Notun Reeti fiction manifesto that came up in 1958 to accommodate the first post-Partition generation of fiction writers failed to have space for a Muslim author. There was no Muslim participant in the Hungryalist, Shastravirodhi and Neem Sahitya movements. Syed Mustafa Siraj emerged subsequently, possibly because he was a Syed, who had to securely place himself within centralist metropolitan canon, to be accepted. In view of the universalized discourse, Siraj may not be stationed at the periphery as the Other, in the center-margin cartography.

Bangla Muslim fiction writers emerged during and after the Naxal upheavals who began to question universal principles of truth, as the Bangla polity was shaken from bottom to top, creating a level playing field for Muslim authors, to enable them to articulate their newly acquired confidence. However, no Muslim author has been included in Naxal Andoloner Golpo (1999) anthologized by Bijit Ghosh. Authors who subsequently appeared such as Badaruzzaman Choudhury, Joynal Abedin in Barak Valley, and Abdul Jabbar, Afsar Ahmen, Ansaruddin, Sohrab Hossain, Niharul Islam, Ebadul Haque, Helen Noor-e-Azad, Kamal Hossain, Murshid A. M. and others in West Bengal, developed and articulated a sense of cultural and subcultural imagination, opened up micro-cultural native forms to celebrate texts of indigenous heterogeneity and Muslim oral traditions. Another reason for their emergenceand reason for subsequent intra-community rural discordwas power restructuring due to land reforms. The largest segment of the community is engaged in agriculture. Author Murshid A. M. is actually Murshed Ali Mondol. During the post-Naxal period, the community started exuviating vocational surnames such as Mondol, Gharami, Laskar, Majhi, Kathami, Sardar, Mahajan, etc., to get rid of subaltern semiotic taint. Since Independence, these authors have a tendency to abbreviate their names, which may be explained in socio-cultural terms as postmodern paroxysms of self-mutilation, as have been done by A. Mannaf, S.M. Nijamuddin, M. Nasiruddin Khan, M. Abdullah Mollah, and others.

…The (Muslim) author faces a double-edged challenge. The readership comprise a Hindu majority which has very little knowledge of the multiple layers of micro-cultures of urban and rural Bangla Muslims. The critics and academics are Hindu, mostly upper caste, who generally do not have much knowledge either. If a Muslim hero is constructed at the center of the discourse, it may create a cartographic violence unless the margin is also fictionalized as Muslim. Eternal truth evaporates into thin air if a Hindu boy falls in love with a Muslim girl, even in fictions. If the author aspires to enter the centrist metropolitan consumer-friendly literature, he is doomed to create make-believe culture and characters for a majority-dominated book market. In the same manner that upper-caste Hindu writers mimicked, copied, borrowed, repeated, imitated and aped English authors and their canons during colonial rule, the Muslim author is forced to follow popular Hindu writers of the day. If he does not, he is doomed to be permanently marginalized, neglected and debarred from literary history. From the days of Mir Mosharraf Hossain (1847-1912) and his periodical Ajijan Nehar through other magazines like Moslem Bharat,

Mohammadi to Ataur Rahman’s (1919-1997) Chaturanga, the entire oeuvre of Muslim fiction writers is completely absent in linear mapping of Bangla short stories by Sisir Kumar Das, Narendranath Chakrabarty, Upendranath Gangapadhya, Bhudeb Choudhury and Narayan Gangapadhya. The problem with these linearity-driven literary historians have been that they have confined themselves to dissection of the plot. In the short stories written by Muslim authors, the plots would have proved culturally uncharted and inaccessible. And for Muslim authors the complex cultural framing of the stories is vital to their meaning.

With the increase in the number of Muslim writers a well as the magazines to sustain them, the covert and overt local narratives of the periphery have started challenging and undermining the exclusive and universalizing pressures of the dominant discourses and discursive practices. Magazines such as Abar Eshechi Phiray edited by Ebadul Haque is published from rural rice-bowl of Bhagwangola; Digbaloy is edited by Kamaluddin Ahmed from Karimganj in Assam. It is obvious that is such a vast panorama the text of young Muslim authors becomes the site of struggles between conflicting discourses, a site where personal and communal trauma intersect, creating scope for alternative readings. The panorama is also replete with non-metropolitan Bangla discursive unconscious, a repressed sense which had been internalized from the hegemonic discourses. But the cultural spaces do not provide homogeneity to authors stationed in West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley. Postmodern canonless-ness for them functions as the external unifier.

Srinivas Aravamundan

As a postscript to the study on The Future Poetry since 1920, I’d like to post an article on Sri Aurobindo’s the Future Poetry as seen through the curious Indian English hybrid language that Srinivas Aravamudan (asst. professor at Duke University) calls Guru English. As instanced by Sri Aurobindo Guru English has not only metaphysical intention but, serves as a resistance medium.  Aravamundan writes: “The precision of his Guru English enabled a spiritual counter-thrust against his Western colonial masters”., while also recognizing the democratic and cosmopolitan influences in his text. “Aurobindo deems…..Whitman as the true successor to Shelly, because of Whitman’s foresight that can include the cosmic, universal and the democratic within its vision”

Aravamudan uses the Future Poetry an an example of Sri Aurobindo’s theorizing of  “Guru English” as it applies to English Language Poetry. This post begins with some passages from the book Guru English on The Future Poetry and following this is the introductory chapter to the book Guru English that further explains Aravamudan’s concept. All in all Aravamundan’s exploration of Sri Aurobindo favorable by in large allowing Sri Aurobindo’s truth claims to speak for themselves, not simply appropriating them to various types of academic theorizing.  For example he does not feel the need to interrogate the claim of “Overhead Poetry” in Sri Aurobindo’s usage. However, what he does interrogate is the application of the English language form that dovetails with concepts of Vedantic spirituality that for the purposes of his study begins with Rammohun Roy in the early 19th century and stretches through Sri Aurobindo and others to its usage today in such notables as Deepak Chopra.  His study has resulted in how he constructs Guru English while demonstrating the interesting line of flight that the globalization of spirituality has taken following its Indian diaspora. rc

“Inspired by Cousins essay Aurobindo wrote a long justification of the spiritual and literary aims of his poetic endeavors entitled Future Poetry. The powers of English poetry and ancient Vedic incantation can be combined by “discovery of a closer approximation  to what might call the mantra in poetry, that rhythmatic speech which, as the Veda puts it, rises at once from the heart of the seer and from the distant home of Truth. In rhythmic movement verbal form and visionary insight, English poetry can match the mantric achievements of Vedic seers. Furthermore : The Indian spirit could seize powerfully the spiritual motive in an age which lived a strenuous objective life and was strongly objective in its outward mentality.

Aurobindo had celebrated Bankim’s “Banda Mataram” as a powerful nationalist mantra, but as one that had eventually lost its efficacy. The greater mantra now had to come from a more rarified transcendental plane. This goes a step beyond Bankim’s dictum regarding the objective instrumentality of English, as the spiritual initiative will be seized in the language of the objective, English, which will itself be subjectively deepened……

The Future Poetry Aurobindo claims will focus on Truth, Life, Beauty, Delight and Spirit in equal measure

The new poetry of the Future is ushered in as a concrete reality even when it is claimed that it will be more intuitive, less recondite, and better connected to the material life of man. While Aurobindo shies away from direct identification with this lineage (Rishis) self reference hovers in the background. “The idea of the poet who is also a Rishi has made its appearance again” Guru English does not mean only literature about the spirit , it means also a bonus, that of English poetry written by gurus, the foremost exponent being Aurobindo himself. Why would this not be true, especially when the voice of poetry is deemed to appear “from regions above us (from) a Supermind which sees things in their innermost and largest truth”?

The adequate and dynamic degrees of poetic speech will correspondingly be raised to “intuitive and illuminative” powers and this revitalized Guru English will be the distinctive feature of “nations of the coming dawn” The guru armed with the mantra of overhead poetry will sing of the imminent arrival of the superman…….

If Guru English expressed the efficiencies of a Cosmopolotinism. ceaselessly mopping up the various remaindered fractions that earlier Romantic particularisms and universalism could not reach. Romanticisms afterlife is ensured in the prosthetic and derivative discourses, such as Guru English.”  (Aravamuda p101-104)

Guru English:
South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language
Srinivas Aravamuda

Introduction

Imbued with a knowledge of objective sciences by English education, our people will be able to comprehend subjective truths.
–Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Anandamath

IT IS A TRUISM, universally acknowledged, that English dominates the globe today as no language ever has in the recorded history of humanity. Despite the linguistic diversity of a world that features more than five thousand natural languages by some counts, a mere one hundred languages account for the mother tongue of 95 percent of the world’s population, twenty-five languages for about 75 percent, and just twelve languages for about 60 percent.¹ Second in terms of total number of speakers, English dominates by virtue of its stranglehold on global organizations as an international auxiliary or link language. Barring theories of the monolinguistic origin of the species that can never be proven, the observer can only look at existing examples of linguistic globalization in recorded history in order to glean the evidence.

A comparison of the current dominance of English with that of other languages at different times leads to the discovery that empires and religions have been the two most obvious vehicles of linguistic universalism. Sometimes a universalizing religion inherited a language-vehicle from a successful empire, as the Catholic Church did from the Romans, thereby establishing Latin as an administrative and scholarly medium of communication across Europe for a millennium and a half. In the case of Arabic, the situation developed the other way around, whereby the political ambitions of the caliphs spread it around the Mediterranean and West Asia from Spain to Persia and India for at least half a millennium, even though various political empires had actually inherited the language from Islam’s humble origins as an iconoclastic desert religion. Pan-Arabism has still kept modern Arabic alive as a viable lingua franca throughout western Asia and northern Africa, and to a limited extent in other places where Islam is a presence. Mandarin Chinese, demonstrably the tongue with the greatest number of speakers today, remains one of the stable legacies of Han imperial suzerainty, even if there is no significant religious impulse to spread it beyond familiar ethnic confines. The case of Sanskrit reveals a pattern of survival that is exactly opposite to that of Chinese. A largely sacerdotal language with only sporadic instances of political backup, Sanskrit has nevertheless survived for well over three millennia. Although still very much in use for ritual and religious instruction throughout South Asia and wherever Hinduism has a foothold, from Bali to Trinidad, Sanskrit is now largely a dead, classical language imbued with symbolic meaning. Hindi and Bengali, two of Sanskrit’s many descendants, are counted among the top ten spoken languages in the world, but there is considerable resistance in India to Hindi as a national language. German and Russian had correspondingly greater and lesser roles–now vastly diminishing–because of their histories of joint political dominance in central and eastern Europe, and for the latter, also in central Asia. Japanese is important in east and southeast Asia, but is becoming less so with the importance of English as an international auxiliary language. The role of Swahili, initially promoted by Pan-Africanists, has declined along with the other political goals of the movement. All the same, francophone Africa and the hispanophone Americas continue to sound their different imperial and postcolonial legacies. Spanish is certainly one plausible transcontinental alternative still competing with English.

Turning to the case of English, it is obvious that events have conspired (although by no means as irreversibly as some might assume) to give it its current status. That the world has moved from the dominance of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century to the United States as unilateralist hyperpower by the twenty-first century without having to change the language of imperial dominance (save dialectal differences from British to American English) is perhaps a fortunate (depending on already acquired English proficiency) or unfortunate turn of events for the new rulers as well as the ruled. It is not merely the political dispensation at hand that ensures English supremacy at this point: the cultural and technical vocabularies of science and technology, capitalist business economics, and television and media have instituted an even more important role for English to play as the ultimate knowledge base from which other languages can be launched or situated in relation to each other. English is still a minority elite language in the world, as any imperial or religious language always has been, to a lesser or greater extent. But English’s strong connection with computers, medicine, business, media, higher education, and communications–well before all these areas exploded globally–makes its dominance even greater than did the twentieth century’s handover of global political supremacy to the Americans. It is arguable whether a future Chinese domination of the globe (as some futurologists predict) would, if it did occur, nonetheless maintain the highly differentiated and specialized functions that English has already come to play, with ramifications that are legal, technical, and communicational.

While the simple abstraction of English-in-general has potentially a very long history ahead of it, there are also differentiations that occur within the language as it spreads itself. Languages do not always remain unified, as the history of Latin’s or Sanskrit’s multiple offspring demonstrates. This book focuses on the global impact of Indian English in the spirit of identifying a discrepant cosmopolitanism within it. Much has already been made of the peculiarities of English in South Asia, as a dialect and lingua franca with considerable cosmopolitan appeal. In terms of the total numbers of English speakers, India now ranks third in the world, after the United States and Great Britain. In India, maybe 3 to 5 percent of the population speaks English fluently (approximately 30 million to 50 million speakers), an especially significant minority constituting most of the elite and a section of the urban upper middle classes. If passive comprehension of English vocabulary were included, the figures would increase considerably. While such class parameters suggest that the language remains an acrolect–or a language spoken largely by elites–studying this language’s iterations and performances leads to new and interesting discoveries. Before positing a historical essence (whether postcolonial, bureaucratic, or technological) bound up with English’s role, significance, and global outcome, it would be best to track the many anomalous refashionings of the language and reflect on their variety.²

First introduced in South Asia by Christian missionaries in the seventeenth century, English made few inroads until the expansion of the activities of the East India Company. While Western colonialism and Christian evangelism often went hand in hand around the globe in the last few centuries, it is well known that the record in South Asia is especially complicated; from the outset, important conflicts arose between missionary and commercial agendas. The English Bible was one of the first texts to be translated into a number of South Asian vernaculars. Several outstanding discussions of the impact of the Bible in colonial South Asia have transformed our understanding of the consolidation of national identities as well as the elaboration of transcultural differences.³ By 1823, learned natives such as Raja Rammohun Roy were petitioning the company’s authorities to make English education, especially of the scientific and secular variety, more widely available. The culmination of this process was the much-discussed Macaulay Minute that was approved on March 7, 1835, a document that declared in the voice of the British rulers that they needed “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern–a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.” The same document also disparages native learning with the phrase that “a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” British imperial rule therefore unapologetically replaced Persian, the prestige language under the Mughals, with a new one, English.⁴

An Indian form of English–and therefore its development as a new South Asian vernacular rather than just as an imperial echo–first acquired recognition, paradoxically, when representatives of high Victorian imperialism dismissed it as a bureaucratic cant of the native functionaries and interpreters of the Raj, a “Baboo English” or “Cheechee English,” to be literally ridiculed and disparaged. Even lesser variants began to be recognized, such as Butler English, Bearer English, Box-Wallah English, Kitchen English, and Hinglish (Hindi-English).⁵ By February 1830, the first issue of an English-language journal in Calcutta entitled The Parthenon called itself the voice of people who were “Hindu by birth, yet European by education”–in other words, the voice of those multilingual and bicultural intermediaries of imperial governance. While educational qualifications in the many vernacular languages conferred much less prestige, being a colonial functionary, or baboo, engendered considerable frustration and intellectual alienation from both the Anglo-Indian elite and indigenous traditions. The baboo began to be satirized as a volatile mixture of the dregs of imperialist culture and the heights of philosophical absurdity. The baboo stereotype–from Rudyard Kipling to Peter Sellars–features a singsong accent, clownish head-nodding, pretensions to erudition, credentializing anxieties, a moralistic tone, a liberal use of clichés and mixed metaphors, and incongruous literal translations into English from the vernacular. Baboo English (as Indian English) is also subject to interferences from typical features of South Asian languages that are uncommon in English–such as the function of word reduplication as an intensifier (“little little children”; “very very nice”). Recognizing this hybrid and ridiculous subject as an anomaly several decades later, in 1874 a writer in Mukherjee’s Magazine would metaphorically wring his hands in an article entitled “Where Shall the Baboo Go?”⁶ Baboo (or Babu) English eventually became the butt of Victorian satire and the prized linguistic object of colonial lexicographies such as Colonel Henry Yule’s and A. C. Burnell’s famous Hobson-Jobson.

Sociolinguistics has attempted to separate analytically distinct aspects of Indian English, such as the instrumental function (in establishing prestige and social hierarchy), the regulative function (in law, administration, and business), the interpersonal function (as a link language within modernity), and the innovative function (in literature or cultural production).⁷ While the first three aspects have always been very important, in the last two centuries of the reception of English in South Asia–and hence the ubiquity of the baboo stereotype–it is only in recent decades that greater attention is being paid by the literati to the imaginative and innovative function of cultural production supported by dialectal–as well as political–independence. Post-independence writers from G. V. Desani to Salman Rushdie, and Indian cinema and media have since disseminated an Indian English dialect (with regional variants) that has gone global in its quest for new markets and audiences. India is among the ten largest book-producing countries in the world and the third-largest producer of English-language books after the United States and Great Britain. It produces more full-length feature films than any country in the world, in multiple languages, but frequently with significant English content. Even so, a recent comprehensive literary history of anglophone writing in India is scathing in its characterization of the imaginative literature, through its title, as Babu Fictions.⁸ Old habits die hard, and older slurs find newer and more persuasive contexts for their justification: while from the British point of view, the indigenous speaker of English could never shed his “Indianness,” now it has become fashionable to assert that anglophone Indians can never shed their compromised elite status. To the extent that the English language is seen reductively as the expression of upper-class status and perspective alone, its capacity to represent the larger social whole is found lacking. Appearing to its speakers as a combination of prestige and disparagement, English represents a complicated status for South Asians that linguists have called diglossic differentiation, or the continual awareness of a relationship between high and low variations. Therefore, Probal Dasgupta calls Indian English an “auntie” (as opposed to mother) tongue, because “the meaning of English in India is not an independent referential potential, but a cross-referential or anaphoric meaning.” A dependent or diglossic relationship makes English in India refer itself either to non-English speaking natives (with implicit superiority), or non-native metropolitan speakers from Britain or the United States (with implicit inferiority). English nonetheless remains the pathway to modernity, science, and business opportunity. Even though India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and other South Asian countries are in the sixth decade after formal independence from British suzerainty, Macaulay, it would appear, continues to have the last laugh.⁹

Following a specific line of inquiry arising from these more generalized literary and linguistic antecedents, this book explores Guru English as a language variant of South Asian origin. There are at least four major aspects of this phenomenon. First of all, in its most literal sense, Guru English is not so much a dialect (even though it might be linked to dialectal variations of Indian English) or a jargon (even though it might frequently possess an esoteric and technical vocabulary), as it is an example of what linguist Michael Halliday has called a register.¹⁰ However, this definition would have to be applied in an expanded sense, as the notion of register is linked to the language of a clearly demarcated socioprofessional group (such as doctors, lawyers, or engineers), whereas Guru English does not function only within such parameters. Anglophone scholars and proselytizers of South Asian religions (especially Hinduism and Buddhism in their revivalist and cosmopolitan versions) use this register in search of audiences who can “only connect” via English. Aspects of free play and innovation within the syntax, vocabulary, and rhetoric of this specific register can be discerned through multiple examples cited by religious practitioners throughout the chapters that follow. As register, Guru English is a theolinguistics, generating new religious meanings. Analyzing religion through language, and language by religion, Guru English is a practice nourished by eighteenth-century orientalists and twenty-first-century gurus alike.

The second, more generalized, aspect of Guru English is as a literary discourse. This form uses multilingual puns, parody, and syncretism that tend to open-ended and indeterminable futures that can influence the religiously inclined and also entertain those not so disposed. While specialized registers might be standard to a speech community, in this case they will vary across communities and practitioners, especially as there is no centralized linguistic stock exchange or even swap meet of lexically innovative gurus and their followers. When it begins to accommodate multiple registers and innovations, Guru English expands into a free-floating literary discourse that can tolerate a high degree of ambivalence. At this point, if I may invoke Michel Foucault, the range of the discourse makes visible characteristics that are not directly linguistic but also institutional and practice-oriented, and contextual to the deployment and manipulation of language as a material phenomenon with corresponding effects within social networks of power. When the Jesuits in Pondicherry planted the spurious Ezourvedam among the natives in order to make for an easier transition to Christianity from a purportedly ancient Hindu deism, they could not have foreseen that Voltaire would use the rationalism of the same text to launch an attack on Christianity in Europe. (Although the original example was in French, the impact of its translated English version was also considerable.) The multiple outcomes of Theosophy through a series of literary innovations I term theosophistries were similarly surprising.

These aspects of register and discourse also make Guru English function in the third sense, as something of a transidiomatic environment–where Guru English is not the directly active participant, but the passive background that informs and enables other cultural or linguistic activity. More about this function will be discerned when Guru English sustains creative interpretations that weave history and politics around perceptions of science, weaponry, and technology–where J. Robert Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavadgi ^-ta ^- at Los Alamos or when the Indian and Pakistani military establishments manipulate religious vocabularies into state-sponsored nuclear rhetoric while naming weapons systems or taunting each other during their recent nuclear standoff. As environment, Guru English can, therefore, be the ground for discursive reversal and secondary elaboration as much as it can be the extension of linguistic register into literary discourse.

If the notion of Guru English as environment is a deeper cultural materialist idea of the notion of register, its fourth aspect is a more aggressive version of its second variant as discourse, namely as a commodifiable cosmopolitanism. Discourses can also be doctrinally thematized as interested and motivated rhetoric. Producing transnational religious cosmopolitanism that retails a saleable commodity, as does Deepak Chopra, in this last sense, Guru English names a marketing device that connects various levels to each other and that extracts a surplus from its mastery of the transidiomatic environment. While it might initially be confusing to use the same phrase to characterize a (linguistic) register, a (literary) discourse, a (transidiomatic) environment, and a (commodifiable) cosmopolitanism, Guru English’s trafficking between negative or passive poles (such as register and environment) and positive or active ones (such as discourse and cosmopolitanism) reveals a story of discrepant levels of engagement. It is hoped that the liquidity of the phrase, Guru English, also allows it to be used by the author and other critics as a tracking device or a depth charge that forces various elements for analysis to the surface for the reader’s attention and critique. However, these four abstract definitions need some more explanation, following which Guru English also merits being situated historically as well as structurally.

In Guru English as register as I have defined it, the indeterminacy of the modifier is visible: there is no possessive finality of the definite article, as there is with the King’s (or the Queen’s) English. Issuing rival dicta, gurus are many, even if at any time there is just one British monarch. The Sanskrit etymology of guru presents this figure as “a dispeller of darkness.” The guru’s power is perceived to be spiritual even as the sisya or chela–the disciple in search of wisdom or enlightenment–can choose to pursue and is sometimes encouraged to perform an absolute surrender of his or her will to the will of the master. Etymologically, the male sisya might perform the funeral rites of a son for the guru, saving him from an afterlife in the underworld. Unlike the spiritual authority of the guru, that of the acarya (preceptor or teacher) is understood to be that of a circumscribed pedagogic authority within accepted social conventions, whereas the figure of the guru, as Sudhir Kakar has also argued, features powerful parental and psychoanalytic functions for the disciple.¹¹ The guru’s function for the disciple, within the framework of an open-ended religious transaction, is therefore potentially unlimited in the manner in which it could transgress personal and social boundaries. Guru is also the astronomical term for Brihaspati, the preceptor of the Hindu pantheon, and designates the largest planet of the solar system that under the Western nomenclature goes by the name of “Jupiter.” This parallel Sanskrit etymology of guru as the planetary and astronomical “heavy” with considerable influence¹² may be just as relevant, even if ironically so, in relation to a history of complicity with, as well as antipathy for, gurus within the history of religion in South Asia.

For these reasons, before we assume too readily the spread of Guru English as lingua franca across the globe, a number of questions must be addressed: Whose (South Asian and Indian) Guru English?¹³ What are the goals of this language’s users? What happens when indigenous religious and cultural conceptions are translated and represented in terms of a language that is, relatively, a very recent presence on the subcontinent? What links various aspects of (South Asian and Indian) English, whether as international lingua franca or national official language, or even more as precise acrolects, sociolects, and idiolects?¹⁴ When native religion and colonial language come together in Guru English, the double engine of religion and empire makes deeper inroads into global dominance and proselytization. Guru English, as register, discourse, environment, and cosmopolitanism, exceeds most other diasporic outcomes of Indian English whether as mother or “auntie” tongue.

The links between Guru English as literary discourse and linguistic register, and the larger questions of the role of English suggests multiple directions of inquiry. Argot almost immediately raises for interrogation various aspects of its profile and function and the goals of its users. Initially, the anglicization of colonial subjects, while eventually making its mark on a global scale, was conceived as crucially necessary for a South Asian audience. Writing to a positivist friend, Jogen Ghosh, in the late nineteenth century, the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chatterjee asserted, “anyone who wishes to address all Hindus must of necessity write in English.”¹⁵ Bankim’s most famous novel of religious atavism, Anandamath [Abbey of bliss], ends with the proposition that “imbued with a knowledge of objective sciences by English education, our people will be able to comprehend subjective truths.” The point made by Bankim’s conclusion, even if a hopeful stretch given empirical realities, was that the English language would, as a means of international access and especially scientific technocracy, objectively create the conditions where pan-Indian cultural unity could be discovered as a kind of remaindered essence. This adoption of English as a via negativa to the literary discourse of “subjective truths” is quite different from other plausible choices, such as Persian, which in Bankim’s context had greater historical precedent as the language of Mughal bureaucracy and government, or Sanskrit, the sacerdotal language of the Brahman-dominated religious and cultural elites of the Hindu majority. We now find that there is an anomalous afterlife to Bankim’s recommendation that he may not have anticipated: the circulation of Hinduism through English was probably an early alternative means–and continues to be an important vehicle–for the religious discourse of middle-class urban Hindus in search of their “subjective truths.” The global transmission of Hindu and Buddhist thought eventually led to the rise of the self-proclaimed ethno-religious nationalist as well as the detached and Asian-influenced cosmopolitan. It might be worth considering the most provocative version of Bankim’s thesis, that the use of English was indispensable to the defining of Hinduism as a universalist “spirituality” at the outset. This new articulation of spirituality cohered around several general assumptions brought to it by colonial discourses and practices, even as it undoubtedly made good use of preexisting practices and doctrines. This necessarily modern presentation of ancient practices explains the constitutive contradiction of Hinduism’s national and cosmopolitan roles far more effectively than various empirical accounts that map the contingent coming together of a number of loosely related practices and identities under the pressure of British colonial rule.¹⁶

Continuing to the third aspect discussed, Guru English is perhaps a perfect example of what linguist Marco Jacquemet has described as transidiomaticity. The notion of certain languages and discourses as constituting a transidiomatic environment allows us to understand how they might have considerable appeal with multiple audiences without necessarily having to posit the particular medium of communication as a coherent foundation. How is this language idiomatically dispersed, translated, and disseminated? Rather than focusing on the exclusively dystopian visions of language-death amidst linguistic imperialism as many linguists have done, Jacquemet urges us to consider languages as flow: mutant, recombinant, and morphing under the conditions of globalization.¹⁷ A renewed appreciation of cultural interconnection by way of transidiomaticity leads to the question of translation. In one sense, transidiomaticity attempts to bypass the necessity for a more conscious or full-fledged translation. Ideas arrive in prepackaged ways that merge with their analogs or cousin-ideas in the host language, thereby preempting a self-conscious reflection on the matter and the manner of translation.

Guru English presents itself as already translated, even though a critical perspective on it would lead to the conclusion that it is very much in need of further translation and specification. The transnational aspect of Guru English mobilizes a South Asian spiritual superiority in search of hegemony. Critical attention to such ideas can dissolve them into particulars that are insufficiently transparent to all locations. To paraphrase translation theorist Naoki Sakai, translation is constitutive of its context only because it fixes two interpretive communities in terms of a stable relation.¹⁸ Of course, these communities might themselves be in full mobility, and the relation is always a temporary one in danger of being broken. For this reason, while Sakai distinguishes sharply between a “homolingual” and “heterolingual” address of translation, it might be preferable to think that all translational situations–like all transnational situations–simultaneously involve homogeneity and heterogeneity, transidiomaticity and incommensurability. The partial nature of context, audience, and subject matter under translation makes for the simultaneous possibilities of communication and its failure. As the special case of a transnational translation currently under purview, Guru English could be at times innocuous, and at other times, noxious. On some occasions, Guru English leads to at least a partial understanding and a fulfilling New Age East-West encounter, whereas at other times this very production is in danger of becoming an explosive and dangerous misapprehension, nothing more than a dehistoricized and false claim to tradition, whether European or Asian. As recombinant, mutant, and simulacrum, Guru English is the sign of heterogeneity within the homogeneous, demonstrating that the imperial tongue can be reshaped internally even as English colonizes its linguistic others.

With respect to the fourth aspect–cosmopolitanism–its relationship to the volatile terrain of religion needs explanation to understand the function of Guru English as one such form. Such a relationship may appear counterintuitive, especially as the Voltairean-Kantian-Weberian legacy of Enlightenment modernity has depicted the dominant line of cosmopolitanism as resulting from the privatization of religion, and indeed, disenchantment with the world. Clichés of the sort that modernity resulted in the twilight of the idols, and the death of God(s), abound in this tradition, despite growing evidence that the news of religion’s death was greatly exaggerated and that the history of Judeo-Christian monotheism and deism was rather conveniently collapsed with the itineraries of polytheistic and other faiths. Cosmopolitanism, according to this general Enlightenment doctrine, is a disposition that creates world fellowship, or at least passive membership, through the abandonment of religion for a (political) philosophy. The basis for this philosophy would have been a humanist recognition of the discrepant itineraries of individual lives. As Rammohun Roy put it in an 1831 letter to Talleyrand, pleading for the abolition of the passport system, such an act would be necessary “to promote the reciprocal advantage and enjoyment of the whole human race.” According to Rammohun, “it is now generally admitted that not religion only but unbiased common sense as well as the accurate deductions of scientific research lead to the conclusion that all mankind are one great family of which numerous nations and tribes existing are only various branches.”¹⁹ Amid a generalized recognition of the rights of individual subjects and the dignity of all cultures, as well as affirmations of the freedom of individual and group expression as resistances to dominant forms, the cosmopolitan, as a mediator, eschews interested particularity for the role of spatial referee, sometimes turning into a crypto-universalist if not into a full-fledged one. However, others, by identifying earlier Christian and Renaissance humanisms as performing this universalistic task, have undercut grand narratives of the Enlightenment’s romantic transformation of religious irrationalism into secular rationalities. As Tzvetan Todorov asserts, the doctrines of the world-proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam have done a great deal of the groundwork for modern transcultural dialogue. More specifically to South Asia, the neoreligious Right in India is promoting its own disturbing version of Hindu universalism. We have, therefore, a situation where a number of enchanting and enchanted modernities contest the disenchanted Enlightenment stereotype.²⁰

Cosmopolitanism itself is undergoing something of a revival, and it is useful to identify Guru English as one amongst several alternative and popular forms of cosmopolitanism. While the disavowal of cosmopolitanism after 1968 could be explained in the context of the global Left’s repudiation of Stalinism and the decline of internationalism following decolonization, responses to the failure of modernization theses and developmental agendas took several routes. One tendency was the repudiation of cosmopolitanism itself as a bourgeois, Western, or delocalized aesthetic aspiration, outmoded and tone-deaf to contemporary realities. A more tolerant (if patronizing) downgrading of cosmopolitanism represented it as a noble but idealist goal that could not respond to, or correspond with, the rootedness of local politics, interests, cultures, and perturbations. Thus cosmopolitanism was seen as politically ineffective but nonetheless tolerable in manifestoes, mission statements, and party congresses. However, after these reactions reached the dead end of extreme particularity with the fragmentary positions of subnationalisms, radical relativism, and the micropolitics of location, it appears that several thinkers have taken a step back in the direction of the general. We now see the return of die-hard cosmopolitanisms of the old kind, featuring Kantian projectors, World Bank economists, and religious universalists. Recent apologists for the grand normative scaffolding of Western liberalism and universalism include Martha Nussbaum, Tzvetan Todorov, or Julia Kristeva. There are, of course, those philosophers such as Richard Rorty who are willing to eschew universalism and embrace the charge of being ethnocentric, thereby actively separating the tradition of Western liberalism from that of science, rationality, and universal truth, but such pragmatism sacrifices global scruples for a blinkered chauvinism or cultural particularism.²¹

More cautious voices than these recommend a shuffle between globalization and localization that leads to a “glocalization” of uncertain consequence. Such a newly cautious cosmopolitanism attempts to rebuild and pluralize cosmopolitanism from below. Its theorists thereby describe the new cosmopolitanisms as “discrepant,” “vernacular,” and “actually existing” in place of the older forms, which were preformed, normative, and universalistic. This grass-roots version of cosmopolitanism–one that migrant workers, tourists, and refugees participate in as equally as transnational executives, academics, and diplomats–is represented by James Clifford, Homi Bhabha, and Bruce Robbins, who insist on the careful reconstruction of cosmopolitanism as an efficacious (but always provisional) lingua franca that dissolves the reifications of particularity. Cosmopolitics in general, however, runs the danger of being perceived as a vacuous idealization despite various qualifications. Like any other discourse, cosmopolitanism cannot be inherently stable in terms of its meaning but will shift semantically according to context, use, and function.²²

While these debates have not resolved sticky cultural differences into an all-encompassing identity of contemporary cosmopolitanism, they increasingly suggest that we turn to the globalized particular, or to the particular generalization, with a heightened sense of their mutual relationship. The attempt of this book to characterize Guru English as one more such venture is not necessarily as positive in its outcomes as defenders of cosmopolitanism would want, or even recognize. Cosmopolitics is increasingly more effective as a rooted discourse rather than a free-floating one, just as much as border-crossing and nomadism appear to have greater purchase when anchored in relation to the specific ecologies and geographies where the crossings are taking place and where they acquire very specific forms of transgressive meaning. Guru English as cosmopolitanism, then, is the lived practice of which a universalism of some sort is often the theory–even if cosmopolitans might often disavow their universalist underpinnings. Understanding this perceived unity masking practical multiplicity in the case of the Englishes that are contained within the notion of a global English might also result in a reinterpretation of other universalisms and cosmopolitanisms, whether religious or secular. Étienne Balibar’s notion of multiple universals echoes this idea of a cosmopolitanism under the conditions of transidiomaticity: the new universalism consists of “a temporal movement whose regulatory claims are iterative rather than imperative, translational rather than transcendental.” This feature is especially visible in universalisms from below that enact themselves through performance and intercultural communication rather than from centralized directives.²³ Despite their ambivalences, will post-colonial cosmopolitans suffer the fate of being misunderstood as straightforward Western liberals (sometimes with validity)? There is no easy answer to these debates, as Rabindranath Tagore realized in his lectures on nationalism: “[N]either the colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism, nor the fierce self-idolatry of nation-worship is the goal of human history.” The postcolonial world has flirted with both prongs that Tagore criticizes and yet has found neither option ultimately rewarding for its inhabitants.²⁴

Religious forms of affinity in late modernity have grown in proportion to the fact that state secularism and the politics of civil society have not delivered adequate forms of group vindication. The utter lack of a successful progressive politics under the global rule of the market has led to even obscurantists exploiting cosmopolitan strategies for gaining leverage. Notorious for the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States that shook the world, Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network functioned through various shadowy electronic and transnational mechanisms. This right-wing Wahhabism–and its client group, the Taliban, which gave it sanctuary in Afghanistan–has been characterized as representing “a deracinated fanaticism–a kind of bleak Islamic cosmopolitanism.”²⁵ Such developments arose partly because the postcolonial state, from which the gospel of diverse collectivity could have been preached (whether universalism, nonsectarian uniformitarianism, or multiculturalism), was exposed as ideologically bankrupt even as the double standards of the Western powers led to the First World’s continued obliviousness and instrumentalization of the lives of the rest of the world as before. Hijacked by local elites for financial gain and ethnic domination, the postcolonial states survived–and continue to survive–as a homeostasis between the cynicism of global powers and the marketplace, and the great internal contradictions, corruption, political violence, and repression characteristic of the rule of the few in so many countries.

In a brilliant essay entitled “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” Bernard Cohn argues for the existence of a transmission process whereby Indians produced knowledge about themselves as a form of tribute, a knowledge that was subsequently recoded by Europeans. While orientalists took credit for discovering and cataloging the cultural riches of India, their labors would have been impossible without a vast retinue of translators, scribes, scholars, and informants. Guru English represents aspects of this recoding that began a life of its own as a supplement, even as “practical necessity” began to trump “scholarly curiosity” and Hindustani replaced Persian as the practical language of command within India. As Cohn suggests, “the Indians who increasingly became drawn into the process of transformation of their own traditions and modes of thought were . . . far from passive.” Guru English is about the productivity, agency, and cumulative consequences of this original tribute exacted in a colonial situation, although it is never simply about the reasserted command of language by just Indian natives or British colonizers but, as we shall see, about eventually much more than just the initial parties to the historical quarrel.²⁶

A beautiful watercolor from 1790 demonstrates a scene of instruction that can be read as a generative allegory for the origin of Guru English, in the context of the extraction of tribute through the various investigative modalities of colonial epistemology that Cohn outlines. And yet, there is the hint of something entirely different. One of the paintings in the voluminous Mackenzie collection of the India Office Library, “View of Dindigul, with an English officer, perhaps Colin Mackenzie, and an Indian in the foreground,” poses several intriguing aspects of the religious knowledge transcreated in a colonial situation that anticipates future outcomes other than just the predictable one of empire. A Scot who joined the East India Company out of the desire to learn more about Hindu mathematics, Mackenzie became a military engineer who rose to surveyor general of the Madras Presidency and eventually to the post of the first surveyor general of India from 1815 until his death in 1821. Mackenzie was no conventional orientalist, however. He did not speak any Indian languages even though he was interested in antiquities, coins, engravings, archaeological sites, and any accounts of religious “contentions” and “establishments.” He sketched constantly and also employed scribes, artists, fellow officials, and local informants to document visually what they saw, thereby accumulating a vast archive. Yet he died without being able to organize his vast collection into anything like the evidentiary materials for a full-fledged colonial sociology. That was to come after him.²⁷

Mackenzie’s vast collection contains some drawings of gurus, sannyasis, and itinerant holy men. However, “View of Dindigul” is unusual in its foregrounding of a dialogue between a British redcoat and a robed Indian. The native appears to be a Muslim religious teacher, possibly a Sufi. In the background is the impressive fort of Dindigul, built on the top of a rock formation in southern (the name tintukkal in Tamil means “bolster-shaped rock”). Looking like a Tuscan hilltown rendered through the techniques of the British school, the painting reveals several indeterminate structures within the walls of the fort, including possibly the temples to Mariamman, Vinayaka, and Muruga that are still extant there today. Tipu Sultan controlled this area and is said to have installed the Mariamman temple, although he was defeated by the British several years later at the battle of Seringapatam (Srirangapatna) in 1799.

However, the figures in the foreground are not engaged in a conversation about the fort, but yet another structure. They are both seated, with the North Briton as recipient of the information revealed by the authoritative indexical gesture made by the South Indian. The rock in the background resembles anything from a seated elephant to a gigantic conch shell–both iconographically more relevant for Hindu notions of the sacred than the local comparison of the rock to a bolster. Rather than gesturing to the magnificent rock, the obvious subject of the painting, the native points to the archaeological structures at the left (his right). These structures are likely Islamic, perhaps a mausoleum of a local Muslim chieftain or saint. There is an air of tranquil communion about the scene that does not suggest anything like the peremptory catalog description by Mildred Archer, “Colonel Mackenzie cross-examines a villager about a nearby tomb.”²⁸ Imperial hindsight has clearly infected the catalog description with the suggestion of a quasi-judicial prosecution where the native is being held to account, but does a careful look at the image suggest, in part, the more lyrical portrait of a transculturated guru and chela, an Indian religious teacher and a European disciple? That might be too much of an interpretive stretch in the opposite direction. Although Mackenzie is clearly taller and unable to sit in the Indian’s posture (appearing to balance on a rock with his feet disrespectfully pointing outward), he communicates a mixture of authority and deference toward his interlocutor, as does also the Indian. While the officer gazes curiously (and uncomfortably) at the monument, the fakir (entirely at ease in his surroundings) is the source of its meaningful relevance, and intent on communicating this (in no uncertain terms) to the officer. The suggestion is that neither figure can do without the other, and that both are needed for the scene’s intended viewer. The slight disharmony between the two figures, with one expounding to the other, and the other rapt in the object rather than his interlocutor, allows a reflection on several outcomes.

While the zoomorphic rock-fort is the spectacular and arresting image in the background, suggesting the archaic and picturesque mysteries of monumentality expressed through paintings and etchings by William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell during this period, the human interchange in the foreground is more prosaic. Evoking contemporary time, the figures in the foreground stage a moment of simple revelation. The conversation with the native elicits the topographical, architectural, and possibly religious information that Mackenzie was after. Yet, the color and pattern of the clothing of the Indian figure visually echo the rock in the background, connecting the “ancient” Hindu landscape to the “medieval” Muslim exponent, and through him to the British officer, emblem of the busy surveyor of “modern” India. In this manner, the painting becomes an anticipatory allegory of British historiography’s tripartite periodization of Indian history that was still to follow.

In 1817, Mackenzie wrote lyrically about the Brahman informant who greatly assisted his Mysore survey several years later: “the connexion then formed with one person, a native and a Bramin, was the first step of my introduction into the portal of Indian knowledge; devoid of any knowledge of the languages myself, I owe to the happy genius of this individual, the encouragement and the means of obtaining what I so long sought . . . From the moment the talents of the lamented Boria [by then deceased] were applied, a new avenue to Hindoo knowledge was opened.”²⁹ As this quotation reveals, the linguistically incapable Mackenzie would need to have relied on the early locutions of Guru English to make sense of his environment, and he is deeply grateful to his native instructor. Perhaps the person strikingly present in the Dindigul image is a Muslim version of Boria, serving the role of the Brahmanical (all too Brahmanical) intermediary or translator. It is through such translations that Guru English will later become one of the primary modes of communicating Indian religion to outsiders.

A brief historical schema for the development of Guru English is necessary to explain the chronological sweep of the project, which ranges from the late eighteenth century of the image to the present. Taking stock of developments since the advent of the British in an early survey entitled Modern Religious Movements in India, J. N. Farquhar sees a great religious awakening beginning in India around 1800. Farquhar puts forward a threefold answer to the question of why the awakening began at that time rather than any other:

The answer is that the Awakening is the result of the cooperation of two forces, both of which began their characteristic activity about the same time, and that it was quickened by a third which began to affect the Indian mind a little later. The two forces are the British government in India as it learned its task during the years at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and Protestant Missions as they were shaped by the Serampore men and Duff; and the third force is the work of the great Orientalists [Colebrooke, Wilson, and Tod]. The material elements of Western civilization have had their influence, but apart from the creative forces, they would have led to no awakening.³⁰

Following from Farquhar’s analysis of neoreligious awakening, but generating some different periodizations for the anglophone representations of Indian religions (and especially Hinduism), I see the evolution of Guru English as occurring in three distinct phases corresponding to the political rule of the subcontinent. These would be as follows: (a) the period of the East India Company (1757-1857); (b) the period of the British Raj (1858-1947); and (c) the postcolonial period (1947-the present). The first phase could be subdivided into two parts: (i) 1757-1805, when the work of the first-wave orientalists was consolidated; and (ii) 1806-57, when the rise of utilitarianism repudiated or sidelined orientalist agendas with the anglicists triumphing over the orientalists by 1835. However, it was in the heyday of anglicism that Raja Rammohun Roy provided the first sustained native voice in Guru English through his inception of the Brahmo Samaj while in dialogue with European and American Unitarians. The second phase, of the formal period of the British Raj, could also be subdivided into two parts. An important period was (i) 1858-1919, when first-wave nationalism as well as cosmopolitan syncretisms such as the Brahmo Samaj, Theosophy, and the Ramakrishna Mission reinterpreted and modernized Hinduism in English, even as orientalism was greatly revived as high Indo-European philology under scholars such as Max Müller and Monier Monier-Williams. The second part of this period, (ii) 1920-47, saw a partial disappearance of Guru English as the nationalist sway overwhelmed other religious-cosmopolitan agendas with the great success of political Gandhianism–even though these cosmopolitan agendas continued to exist below the surface. Theosophy made inroads in Asia, Europe, and the Americas at least until the late 1920s, even as it became more common for the first wave of gurus and yogis to proselytize in the United States. The third, and final, post-independence phase could again be split into two parts of dormant and active religious cosmopolitanism. The immediate post-independence years, (i) 1947-65, were a period of religious intensification in South Asia (with the partition and its aftermath and significant territorial and military conflicts). Also underway was a subtler preparatory phase among individuals and movements for South Asian proselytization of the rest of the world alongside state-sponsored explorations of secularism. In the most recent period, of (ii) 1966-the present, the guru phenomenon exploded worldwide, after first forming a beachhead in the United States and becoming one accepted component of so-called New Age religions. It was in this final part (since the mid-1960s) when gurus became entirely commonplace in the West, whether it took the form of seeing Hare Krishnas distribute their literature in airports and on the street, learning about transcendental meditation techniques at the office, or encountering competing schools of yoga among the exercise choices at the local health club. Guru English ultimately took on the appearance of the “lifestyle” choice it has come to represent, as a form of domesticated xenotropia within the West and beyond, or what has also been called “the post-colonial exotic.”³¹

Orientalist rediscoveries concerning Indian religion, and the religious syncretism and imperial cosmopolitanism of groups such as the Theosophists formed an important underlay of the Indian nationalist movement even when its goals were ostensibly secular. Annie Besant, longtime president of the Theosophical Society, also served for one year as the president of the Indian National Congress. The nationalist movement’s two best-known leaders–Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru–had both been exposed to Theosophy in their youth. While Nehru remained largely atheistic and secular throughout his life, Gandhi turned to his version of nonviolent Christianized Hinduism as a personalized politics when he returned to India from South Africa. But it is important to note that even “Bapu”–the acknowledged father of the modern Indian nation–developed his creed after being stimulated by initial encounters with Theosophy in England:

Towards the end of my second year in England I came across two Theosophists, brothers and both unmarried. They talked to me about the Gita. They were reading Sir Edwin Arnold’s translation–The Song Celestial–and they invited me to read the original with them. I felt ashamed, as I had read the divine poem neither in Sanskrit nor Gujarati …
The brothers also recommended The Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold . . . and I read it with even greater interest than I did the Bhagavat Gita. Once I had begun it I could not leave off. They also took me on one occasion to the Blavatsky Lodge and introduced me to Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant.³²

While many historians see a double movement in Indian religion from colonial rule and orientalism to modernizing revivalism and nationalism, it is necessary to add to this account a third step: cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and the postnational futures of religious renewal. A language that was produced in the crucible of colonial contestation and modernizing transformation did not stay uniquely in the confines of the sphere within which it arose. The movement from (British) empire to (Indian) nation inexorably led also to and through (transnational) cosmopolitanism.

Enlightenment metanarrative, which proclaims the birth of modernity in the decline of religion, is put on the defensive when faced with religiously based collectivities. When religion reenters the political sphere (as for example, the European Christian Democrats), it is seen as a conservative social phenomenon that has made its peace with a secularized and democratized polity. However, the counterexamples are many. The entries of the Hindu Right into democratic politics in India, and the religious Right in the United States and Israel are also paralleled by the consolidation of Islamist neopatriarchies in several countries from Iran to Egypt to Indonesia. The outcome of religion’s reentry into democracy ( just as that of secularism’s supposed defeat of religion) can never be stable or predictable. As Talal Asad has argued persuasively, the secular and the religious have always coexisted as constitutive forces of social order. While secularity as epistemic category exists everywhere alongside religious conceptions of the world, secularism is a more modern political phenomenon whose goal is to keep religion at bay and purge its role in precise areas such as civil law, politics, and governmental policymaking.³³ The embrace of secularism–after all, a kind of state religion especially since the French Revolution–has led to state-sponsored normative orthodoxies that are very much on the defensive against religious revivalism in countries as different as France, Turkey, or India. In the United States, constitutional history points to an oscillation between two different institutionalizations of secularism–one based on seventeenth-century notions of the passive toleration of religious difference and expression (the conservative approach) and the other similar to the more aggressive “French” idea of antireligious state policy that paradoxically validates by inversion the Christian religion that it has evacuated from that public sphere (the liberal approach). Various well-meaning secularists inadvertently recreate parodically what they most seem to combat, by putting their faith in reason, whereas religious believers had put their faith in the divine. To avoid this contradiction (whereby even atheism begins to resemble a religion), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests that we can find the secular that is not a secularism only by adopting a deconstructive approach of “detranscendentalizing the radical other (of the divine) into figurative instrumentality”–in other words, by paying much closer attention to the idiom of religious belief, especially when this idiom is turned away from theological or divine performance into marking the boundary of the lived everyday.³⁴

Debates about the relationship between nationalism and culture prove that, even when defined as secular, the category of culture is deeply inflected by latent religious markers that become manifest in particular situations–as can be seen the world over in the ideological battles concerned with religion in the schools or opposition to state-imposed normativity in areas of clothing, dress, and physical appearance (Sikh turbans, Muslim headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes, Christian crosses, and the like). Prescient in his critique of Benedict Anderson’s modular and optimistically secular notion of postcolonial nationalism, Partha Chatterjee has argued that the postcolonial subject concedes modernity and progress narratives to the West but holds the nation dear as some kind of atavistic, premodern, and nostalgic religious form, which is then appropriately inflected with ethnic and regional markers. In this regard, it might appear that Partha Chatterjee’s work is a long paraphrase of Bankim’s dictum discussed earlier. While Chatterjee’s criticism affords a better understanding of South Asia’s religion-inflicted politics, its model of nationalism is perhaps unnecessarily pessimistic, even as Anderson’s modular account of nationalism is perhaps optimistic about the triumph of nationalism as secularism and the ease of political transformation following that triumph. Anderson’s revision of his own position is also an interesting development: now he characterizes popular pre-independence nationalisms as forms of unbounded seriality that are universalistically potent but which later become ethnic separatisms only when nationalisms acquire a state and exercise bounded serialities in the form of censuses, and also when long-distance nationalisms fuel reified forms of ethnic particularisms. However, if Anderson’s description of nationalism helps us understand some of its secular bourgeois variants, and Chatterjee’s model is best for mapping South Asian religious nationalism as the pathology of a permanently scarred outcome, neither of their approaches enables us to understand the extensive transnational outreach of South Asian religious cosmopolitanism. In any case, that would be faulting them for what is an epiphenomenon to their projects even though it is central to the concerns of this book.³⁵

If we turn outside South Asia to a social-anthropological approach to the Hindu diaspora, such a shift is also only partially revealing. The spread of Guru English as a linguistic phenomenon is far in excess of its countable demographic collateral: according to one such study, there are about twelve million Hindus outside South Asia (and only over nine million if Indonesia were excluded). Other studies have delineated the diasporic impact of the recent rise of religious fundamentalism and the continuing impact of orientalism on the study of South Asian religion.³⁶ However, this book analyzes some of the consequences of the religious cosmopolitanism that originated in South Asia and that has managed to attain considerable global visibility before and alongside the developments of domestic South Asian politics. Focusing on this flow is not meant to preclude grounded analyses of South Asian religion which have specific purchase on their object of knowledge. This study can, however, be taken to be an important supplement to those that have drawn the picture of recent religious developments exclusively within South Asia. While it is helpful to study the sociology of Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jaina identity within minority communities outside the sacred geography that anchors Hinduism as the majoritarian religion of a South Asian environment, such an approach is surely quite limited by its empiricist reconstruction of communities as stable objects of analysis, alongside their requisite complexity and transformation. Tracking a discourse is a more subtle, and potentially elusive venture, because this kind of flow doesn’t always leave telltale signs or inhabit mental landscapes exclusively, or even predominantly. Of course, as these structures become subtler, mapping their agency likewise poses a harder task. Arjun Appadurai’s cartographic metaphors regarding postmodern disjuncture and difference are also relevant to this issue. Guru English, while it participates in the ethnoscapes or population movements that are reshaping the globe, also marks an important presence in the medias-capes and the ideoscapes, or the representational and the ideological apparatuses. A set of images, representations, and vernacular expressions and colloquialisms, animated by Guru English, has considerable extranational impact and resonance. Movies, literature, and cultural forms using religious discourses synthesizing Asian religious themes have populated Western and global representational flows as never before. Guru English also participates in what Appadurai calls the technoscapes and the financescapes, as some of the later chapters in this book–on the South Asian nuclear standoff, the Rushdie affair, and the literary sociology of gurus–argue.³⁷

The six chapters that follow can be characterized as describing instances of overlapping periodizations of Guru English. Provisionally, these categories could be named neoclassicism, Romanticism, modernism, nuclearism, postmodernism, and New Ageism respectively. While the chapters range chronologically, the first half of the book deals with legacies of the pre-independence period and the second half with independence and after. Two different models of periodization are implicit in the two halves–labels such as neoclassicism, Romanticism, and modernism recall to mind extant conventions of Western periodization, whereas the periodizations involved in the second half–nuclearism, postmodernism, and New Ageism are more controversial and contested as temporal markers, naming one kind of modern apocalyptic millenarianism and two distinct postmillenarian outcomes. The more compressed or telescoped character of the book as it approaches the present–given that the last three chapters deal with some aspects of the post-World War II period–also undoubtedly demonstrates the arbitrary nature of periodizing gestures. I propose these periodizing terms for heuristic reasons. While they cannot entirely be avoided, it is important to stress that these periodizations are speculative proposals rather than positings of deep ontological divisions between radical or discontinuous epistemes of historical temporality.

The first chapter explores the impact of the orientalists and the resultant reaction-formation of a number of indigenous voices with diasporic appeal, including Brahmos such as Rammohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen, Vedantists such as Vivekananda, and yoga exponents such as Yogananda. These figures are neoclassical in that they reinvent continuous tradition under the sign of the advent of modernity. Through some of these individual cases, I narrate the existence of the discourse of Guru English from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It is indeed moot whether neoclassicism of this sort can ultimately be separated very carefully from Romantic nationalism.

More through a principle of convenience and slightly different philosophical emphasis rather than that of radical separation from the figures treated in the first, the second chapter examines the parallel implication of Guru English into a literary form of late colonial Romanticism. Writers such as Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Rudyard Kipling, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sri Aurobindo are shown to contribute richly to this enterprise, one that participates in the Janus-faced project of Romantic nationalism. Looking back atavistically, Romantic nationalism also generates a wholly modern idiom that is produced prosthetically. These important early figures are but the very beginning of a whole range of Indian and foreign romanticists and romanticizers of the subcontinent’s religious wealth. The eternal rediscovery of Indian spiritual and religious mysteries continues unabated, whether in travelogues, tourist brochures, pulp fiction and media, or even occasionally in religious anthropology.

The third chapter focuses on Theosophy and its critique, taking two very important novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses and G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr, as the vehicle for this investigation. This chapter shows how modernism helps these writers derive an ethics of destabilizing and satirical laughter when confronted with the creative obscurantism of religious innovators such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. However, rather than document Joyce’s “influence” on Desani, or conversely, attack those who thereby produce assessments of Desani’s diminished creativity, this chapter focuses on the transcultural dynamics of both Joyce’s and Desani’s attitudes toward Eastern religions. The use of Hinduism and Buddhism (especially through a Theosophical lens in Joyce’s case) makes for other narratives of cultural filiation. Desani’s relationship to Joyce is one of creative affiliation, as is Salman Rushdie’s, and affiliations such as these–which are voluntary and cross-cultural–can best be understood within the postcolonial frameworks of Guru English.

Following these three chapters, the second half of the book shifts to modern techno-millenarianism and its aftermath. The fourth chapter features the sublime rhetoric of nuclear weaponry since 1945, within which Guru English is also deeply implicated. The organizing intelligence behind the Manhattan Project that produced the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, relied extensively on the Bhagavadgita–not just personally, but publicly–to ascribe meaning to the creation of the genocidal weapon that would usher in the nuclear age. Yet the Bhagavadgi ^-ta ^-was also paradoxically the favorite text of various apostles of nonviolence, from Thoreau to Gandhi. How is this possible? A brief textual analysis of the relevant sections of this ancient text will situate it within its imperial and postcolonial contexts. These contexts are deeply informed by the histories of genocide and nuclearism. Perceptions of the weaponry of mass destruction are always connected to other cataclysmic experiences of political conflict and massacre. I analyze the corresponding fallback to the “deep time” of religious imagery by nuclear strategists and antinuclear opponents, by warmongers as well as peacemakers, and by the state as well as the individual. The language of nuclear holocaust, a potent cryptoreligious and cosmopolitan discourse, brings genocide, nationalism, and technology together in terms of an ultimate de-differentiation of the separate spheres that modernism, despite all its epic heroism and parodic syncretism, could not keep apart.

The fifth chapter takes a look at the multiple contexts–of controversy, hybridity, apostasy, and parody–that surround the vexed reception of Salman Rushdie’s satire of South Asian Islam, The Satanic Verses. Treating this episode as one of postmodern crossed connections that renders visible a logic of escalation inherited from nuclearism, and to some extent also as an example of failed theosophistry, I emphasize the limits of Guru English (and indeed Mullah English as its parodic shadow-double). While some observers would want to make a more essentialist argument about Islam in relation to The Satanic Verses, I instead render visible the conceptual embedding of Rushdie’s satire within South Asian syncretic religious contexts and identify the colonial legal apparatuses that he brings into our purview. This ludic relation to Islam is certainly a South Asian legacy Rushdie inherits, among others. While the notion of an Islam sitting within a Guru English might seem inadequate to those who want a fuller accounting of Islam (and the gamut of non-Hindu religions) in South Asia, I would argue that these overlaps are an important beginning to understand common lines of flight that are relevant for the cultural analysis being conducted through this book as a whole. Indeed, there is an immediate and valid objection to be addressed throughout about the “Hinduization” at work in Guru English that ought not to be symptomatically replicated in this critique, or collapse into just one particular form of culturalist accounting. However, as my discussion amply shows, Guru English is a conceptual umbrella that is more likely to be regarded as indiscriminate rather than exclusionary in terms of the religious phenomena it reassembles. In that respect, the concept may well be subject to the limitations and the perversions of the “Hindu Catholicity” that wryly characterize Mrs. Tulsi in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.

The sixth and final chapter turns to an analysis of several modern gurus and the fabrication of a new cosmopolitan lingua franca in New Age enterprises. Episodes in the ongoing saga of gurus in the West are taken up for investigation, including especially the cases of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Bhagwan Rajneesh (Osho), and Deepak Chopra. I deliberately pair these historical figures with their fictional counterparts from the works of V. S. Naipaul, John Updike, and Hanif Kureishi, in order to show how novelistic fiction and historical fact mutually anticipate and interrogate the meanings that circulate around these phenomena. Given the plethora of gurus and clients available for study, these particular instances–whether sociological or literary–are not held up as representative archetypes, but taken as provisional entry points into a whole range of populist trends. Gurus are to be studied more carefully for their transidiomatic suppleness, their rhetorical persuasiveness, their translatability, their commodifiability, and their consumability. Even a brief look at various “pitches” made by gurus at different historical moments, whether colonial or postcolonial, modern or postmodern, historical or literary, shows how versatile and mobile these discourses indeed are. Through Guru English, Madame Blavatsky claims to meet her Theosophical master at the great imperial exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, Swami Vivekananda makes his global career by way of an uninvited bravura performance at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, and Deepak Chopra jockeys for new readers through full-page advertisements in the New York Times after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Observing gurus at work can provide us with very cogent insights into how religious vocabularies, market culture, and utopian desire intersect, in early, middle, and late modernity, and the dystopian futures of nuclearism are more than matched by the utopian projections of contemporary gurus. Or, is this distinction between utopia and dystopia no longer viable in a postapocalyptic world within which we observe the vacillations of economic, political, and religious phenomena?

A brief afterword rounds out the argument of the book, returning us to what is overall at stake, even as I make a few speculative observations on the directions that could not be taken given constraints of time, space, and personal interest. Ranging over two centuries, as well as barrelling on through religious practitioners, literary texts, and world-historical phenomena, this book has something for almost everyone. Such a venture resembles collections of insects in amber: a rendering into concrete of flights of fancy that nonetheless stay alive, in the air and through the brain, with the cadences of Guru English.