n jecent days there has been a great deal of debate on the

significance of the two words "Indian'" and literaturc,"

though not always in a contiguous context, and certainly not
on the same level of theoretical and political resonance. Taken
separately, neithe"Indian" nor "literaturç" would elicit uniform
response even from the common reader.While who or what is
<Indian" has always remained a matter of contention among
sections of the citizenry, especially in post-independence India,
what constitutes "real" literature has also been a matter of serious
debate, more particularly in these turbulent times when the
conflicting claims ofa fragmented public on the society'scåltural
capital have proved to be a little too difficult to settle) The
wrangles on the political and social frontsthat the country
witnessed after the events in post-Babri Ayodhya_and post
Godhra Gujarat, are pointers to the semantic difficulties asso
ciated with the word "Indian". Similarly, atthe centre ofthenewly
proliferating body of dalit and female writing appearing in almost
all the Indian languages today is an uncertainty regarding its status
as "literature" or perhaps as "Literature".
To link the two terms and talk about aunified "Indian literature"
in such a contested terrain would seem a little(perversel More
perverse is the attempt to elaborate a concept of Indian literature
connected by a commonly shared sensibility. In the fast-changing
global scenario of economic liberalisation and cultural
recolonisation, where artistic sensibilities are expected to lose
their regionalflavours and merge into an international sensibility
of global currency, such an attempt might lead to further prob
lems. Alternatively, just as the advocates of liberalisation and
globalisation nurse fond hopes of a strengthened Indian polity
and economy to emerge from the present global climate, the
proponcnts of cultural globalisation too visualise a reinforced
Indian sensibility and Indian literature to come out of the present
imbroglio. But if we examine things a little more closely, we
realise that unlike in the spheres of economy and polity, the
warring supporters of globaland Indian sensibilities are not likely
to remain at loggerheads with each other in the literary sphere.
This is primarily because there has been in vogue, at least since
India came intocontact witlh the European literary ideology, a
strong perception that the literary experience is perhaps universal
insignificance. Goethe's Weltliteratur and Tagore's Viswasahitya,
both meaning "world literature", were attempts at theorising this
perception, though the Euro-centic bias of the two concepts
escaped the notice of the two visionaries in their own times. The
perception certainly was at the heart of ancient Sanskrit poetics
as weil. which obviously was one reason why the Europcan view
 found inmmediate acceptability in the Oricntal world in the era of
modernity and colonisation. What all this suggests is that the
cultural roots of Indian literaturc and Indian
should be construcd as running decpcr and strongcr thansensibility
of the coresponding tendencies in the the roots
socio-cconomic realm.
We aregrappling here with qucstionsofknowledge
and in this context it is worthwhile to remember that formation,
knowledge
is not a neutral category that gets circulated in asociety in an
unmediated way. In fact certain segments of the socicty decide
what is to be counted as knowledge in given moments of social
I development. If knowledge in India with its long history of
imperial rule continues to be tainted by colonial ideology even
after 57 years of independence, it only proves Gramsci's thesisL
that material presence is not essential for the exerc1se of cultural
leadership by adominant group over an underprivileged group.
Imperialism must have come to an end, but not the Empire",
as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recently proclaimed. This,
notwithstanding the theoretical distinction they want maintained
between the two concepts, as the lineaments of the decentred
and deterritorialised cultural empire evolving in India today does
not seem to be far removed from the global scenario appearing
in their cartography. Literary scholars in India then will have
to be self-critical about colonialism's impact on their own cultural
responses that leads to the building up of a new empire. This
will also make it imperative for them at this juncture in time,
that is, after more than five decades of independence and 500
years-of colonial and imperial rule, to rethink concepts like
Indianness, Indian sensibility and Indian literature a little more
closely and critically than has been done before, so that they might
uncover the complicity of these concepts with the
ideology of colonialism on one hand and that of globalisation on
the other.

Indian Literature: A Contested Category

A literary sensibility, needless to say, always operates in the
context of a unified body of literature and an integrated literary
culture. Can we in the present context speak about suchaunified
body of Indian literature and an integrated environment of Indian
literary culture? Before attempting to answer that question it
might be pertinent to point out that."Indian literature", an
ontologically unified object that is theorised as connected by a
shared discursive history and shared epistemological concerns,
India"
is Fot the same as "literature in India" or literatures in
Very few accounts oflndian literary history are seen to maintain this
 C
vital
distinction.
primer, The
The title of the
of lndia,influential Chicago
although theLiteratures
individual essays seems to recognise University
his point,
clearly do not share
recognition.Literature in lndia, as any
culture would tell us, is as old as textbook history of Indian
perhaps little less old than its
a its painting or its
this
arly pursuit of the history community
of this literature,lifc. sculpture,
Sustaincd schol
recent origin and would not
19th go back however,
beyond the
is of fairly
century. This dawn of
Indian literature as indeed
a
is thec moment of the constitutiontheof
Thiscertainly is not totheorctical category.
of the several regional deny the self-knowledge of the identity
scholars in the past, thoughliteratures in India by regional language
literatures too do not go far back historiographic accounts of these
Infact the first histories ofmost beyond the carly 19th century.
only during this time. It is around regional languages too gct writen
this time, again, that Indian
literature gets constituted as a self-validating body
It has been pointed out that the first scholar to use ofknowledge.
this term was
not an Indian, nor were Indian scholars particularly
in tapping the unifying potential of the term in the 19thinterested
century.
It was the German romantic theorist Wilhelm von Schlegal, who
in 1823 used it synonymouslywith Sanskrit literature. Since then
a number of western Indologists have used the tenn to refer to
the unified literature of India, mainly Sanskrit, but at times also,
along with Sanskrit literature, literatures written in Pali and the
several dialects of Prakrit. Very rarely did modern north Indian
languages likeBengali, Urdu or Hindi find aplace in the accounts
of these writers, though literary histories pertaining to somne of
these linguistic cultures were appearing in parts of India during
this period. The strong tradition of Tamil literary culture that
had deep roots in entire south India or the Kannada tradition of
a somewhat later period also went unrepresented in their works.
M Garcin de Tassy's two-volume History of the Literature of
Hindu and Hindustani(French original, 1839-47; revised, en
larged and published in three volumes in 1870-71), Albrecht
Weber's History of Indian Literature (German original; 1852),
George A Grierson's Modern VernacularLiterature ofHindustan
(1889), Ernst P Horowitz's AShort History of Indian Literature
(1907), Maurice Winternitzs three-volume History of Indian
Literature (German original, 1908-22) and Herbert H Gowen's
History of Indian Literature (193 1) are some of the literary
histories that contributed towards the constitution of the category
of Indian literature.4
TRSSharma in the preface to his three volume anthology
ofAncient Indian Literature, is indirectly referringto the Sanskrit
bias ofearly European scholars when he dwells upon the practical
problems that he encountered in locating translations of literature
from ancient India. He says: "While many European scholars
had translated entire works of Sanskrit,few of them had ventured
into Prakrit and Apabhramsa and none into Kannada." Even
today European scholars of modern south Asian languages anc
literature feelcompelled to legitimise themselves and their field:
of study, working asthey do in departments ofsouth Asian studis
at times designated even now as departments of Indology
that are dominated largely by classical Sanskrit scholars. Thi:
is what one should infer from the introduction to a volume o
moderm south Asian literature and film written by scholars workin
in Europcan universities in which the editors unambiguously stat
that one of the motives behind the compilation of the volum
is the need to let the world know of the "seriousness" of thei
discipline. The unabashed eurocentrism of this statement apar
 what one is to understandron this is that in spiteof lhe enormous
Scholarshipthat has been broduced on Indian literature by schol
ars of various hues from the south Asian subcontinent, the
European scholarly attitude to this archive remains unchanged
Irom what it was in the 19th century represcnted by the works
mentioned. All these works without cxccption also sharcd the
class and caste bias of the tradition of Sanskrit-báscd Hindu
orthodoxy. Some present-day critics recognise this, as is
indicated by the following comment of Sheldon Pollock in his
introduction to a recent anthology of cssays on litcrary cultures
from south Asia. Makins references to the carly work in
Indology by westcm scholars starting from Hegcl and Schlegel,
Pollock says:
Sanskrit was posited as the classical code of early India, congruent
with new linked conceptions of classicism and class. .The real
plurality of literaturc in south Asia and their dynamic and long
term interaction were scarcely rccogniscd, cxcept perhaps inci
dentally by Protestant missionaries and British civil servants whÍ
were prompted by practical objectives of conversion and control.
The Theoretical Category
The works by western Indologists mentioned above would
bring the story of the constitution of Indian literature down to
the first quarter of the 20th century. It is now that we see Indian
scholars show interest in the emerging genre and pick up the
blueprint of what was virtually aproject conceived in the west.
Indian scholars who have theorised Indian literature in diverse
ways in the 20th century include KR Srinivasa Iyengar, Sri
Aurobindo, Krishna Kripalani, Umashankar Joshi, VK Gokak,
Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, Sujit Mukherjee, Sisir Kumar Das, G
NDevyand AijazAhmad. Most ofthese scholars withthe obvious
exception of Aijaz Abmad, whose sensitive and highly nuanced
elaboration of the category of "Indian literature" is in effect an
acknowledgement of the impossibility of positing such a cat
egory, arrive at the broad possibility of conceiving an Indian
literature either as the expression of an essential Indian culture
or as the unity of discrete literary formations.®The reformist
nationalist-modernity projects that were under way in all parts
of India in the early 20th century acted as a great unifying force
at this juncture. So did the progressive literary movement (Indian
Progressive Writers Association, IPWA), which launched in
1939 ajoumal under the title New lndianLiterature from Lucknow.
Since its inception in 1954, the Sahitya Akademi, under the
tutelage of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who
was also the first president of the Akademi, has been propagating
the idea of the unity of Indian literature by using the slogan
"Indian literature is one though written in many languages".The
title of the Akademi's journal Indian Literature, echoing the
name of its short-lived IPWA forerunner, is more than symbolic
in this sense.
That Indian literature as a theoretical category was constituted
in the 19th century wouldnowadays be disputed only by bigoted
adherents of cultural revivalism. Many thinkers of liberal per
suasion can be seen, sometimes explicitly, but more often inm
plicitly, to be opposing this bigotry. Sisir Kumar Das's move
in publishing the last two volumes, the ones pertaining to the
period since 1800, ofhis projected multi-volume history of Indian
literature can be readas an implicit criticismofthis bigotry.' Though
the reasons given for publishing the eighth and ninth volumes
ahead of the volumes pertaining to the earlier periods is the easy
 availability of material pertaining to the modern period, onc
cannot ignore the fact that in doing this he is also focusing on
the period when Indian literature actually came into bcing as an
object of knowledge. Perhaps he is also suggesting that this
objcct's chronological extension back into the past is yet to be
properly rcalised. This indeed is how all subject disciplines are
conceived and constructed. An object ofknowledge is constituted
as a discipline with well-charted boundaries and well-defined
objctivcs in answer to certain political compulsions. Indian
Iiterature too, when constucted as a disciplinc, was mcant to
answer certain political and ideological need)
What are the ideological compulsions that fendercd the con
stitution of Indian literature imperative in the 19th century? A
closer look at the nature of thc scholarship produced on Indian
literature during the period in question would hclp us to undcr
stand this problem. The 19th century and afler in Inian history,
it may be remembered, is the period of colonialist and capitalist
cxpansion, of social reform movements, of nationalist awakening
and the freedom struggle leading finally to the country's inde
pendence. It is also the period of increasing modernisation gf
the society with its attendant good and evil effects, of an ex
panding English studies programme, of a proliferating print
culture, of the democratisation of the reading public and, in the
sphere of literature, of an overall consolidation of the western
ideology of the aesthetic. The impact of these diverse develop
ments can be seen imprinted in the kind of scholarshipon Indian
literature that got constituted during this period.
The developments indicated above are too panoramic and
complex for us to do justice to all of them in an analysis of this
kind. But we'll brieflyexamine three issues that are intricately
related to the question of Indian literature and see how they have
interacted with one another to produce the kind of scholarship
associated with the category of Indian literature. We have already
made a passing reference to the first of these in ourpreliminary
remarks on the tradition of Sanskrit-based Hindu orthodoxy that
animated much of the work connected with Indology. We shall
also examine the question of language that has playeda crucial
role in the construction of the category. The co-option of the
category by the nationalist discourse for the production of the
metaphysicsofa national literary sensibility will be the third issue
under analysis.

Orientalism and After

Much of course has been written on westerm Indology and the
scholarship on Indian culturc that it has generated. This especially
after Edward Said's path-breaking critique of Orientalism was
published in 1978. One certainly cannot underestimate the
enormous amount of research carried out on India by European
Orientalists of the 18th and 19th centuries. Much of what would
otherwise have been lost of classical Indian scholarship was
salvaged by the painstaking research of scholars like Charles
Wilkins, Albrecht Weber, William Jones, Henry Colebrooke,
Nathaniel Halhed, Max Mueller and Maurice Winternitz. How
ever, as several later scholars have pointed out, there is an
important lacuna in their work plan and their output, which is
too systematic and too consistent to be treated as an instance of
casual oversight. This relates to the tacit concurrence that they
gave to the division of Indian history intoa predominantly Hindu
ancient India, a Muslim-dominated medieval India and a British
designed modern India. Further, the general framework of their
 analysis assumed that real and valuable contributions to Indian
literaturcwere made in ancient lndia, that is, in the past of India
prior to the Islamic conquest. Very little of the present of literary
India isexplored in the literary histories mentioned above. Weber's
History oflndian Literature discusses only the Vcdic and Sanskrit
periods of the Indo-Aryan language, while Winternitz surveys
Vedic and Upanishadic literaturc as well as the writings in
classical Sanskrit and Prakrit in his History. In doing this the
two were only following in thc footstcps of Sir William Jones,
Indologist and the founder of the Asiatic Socicty of Calcutta,
who as early as I 786 had declarcd that in his studies he would
be contining his rescarches "downward to the Mohammedan
conquests at the beginning of the 11th century, but extend them
upwards, as high as pössiblc, to the earliest authentic records
ofthe human species."l0Though some later scholars like George
A Grierson have deigned to consider specimen texts from the
regional languages too, a good majority of carly Indologists werc
resolutely opposed to the idca of trcating works that belonged
to Indian regional literatures of the modern period as part of the
Orientalist canon.
It is against this background that Said's general observations
on the politics oftheOrientalist scholarship assumes significance.
There are problems with Orientalism both in terms of theory and
methodology, that led to the assumption, widespread among post
colonial thinkers today, of the presence of an ahistorically
homogeneous other in parts of what is calledthe third world,
though one might find it difficult to concur on the basis of this
with Aijgz Ahmad's assessment of it as "a deeply flawed
book"An important reality that the book has allowed us to
see is the deep ideological complicity between Orientalism and
the project of colonialism. This indeed is a complex question
on which much has been written by researchers, historians and
social scientists of all persuasions, so that it might be well-nigh
impossible to summarise the arguments or keep track of the
direction in which the research is progressing.l2 In fact, it is
possible that the conflicting interests of the European powers on
the Indian subcontinent duringthe 18th and 19th centuries might
be said to have cast their shadow on the Orientalist discourse,
though Said has nothing to say on this. Whatever little has been
done by recent researchers on this question is enough to indicate
that this discourse was saturated from the very begiFning with
the claims and counter-claims ofrivalcolonial powers, Jespecially
the English and the French in the Indian context.3 It is the
presence of such competing interests that goes to make this body
of knowledge ideological and its complicity with colonialismn
real. The Orientalist's refusal to recognise the value and authen
ticity ofthe several kinds of modern literature in Indian languages,
then, is to be read as a manifestation of this complicity. One of
the general studies on Indian literature by the Indologist Edwin
Arnold, entitled Literature of India, was issued in 1902 from a
press in New York called the Colonial Press. The suggestion
might sound a little too cynical, but it would not be altogether
absurd to say that Colonial Press' would have made a suitable
imprint for agreat deal of the Indological material published
during the period even outside the New York press.
The above complicity can be seen at work, though at a less
conspicuous level, in the scholars' handling of the language
question. Thisbecomes important because this was the key issue
debated by the literati, especially the Anglicists and the Orientalists
in both India and Britain, for over three decades in the early years
of the 19th century till it was finally resolved by Macaulay's
"Minute on Education" (1835). The
Hindu College in Calcutta - an establishment in 1917 of
secular values through institution meant to propagate
nevertheless flaunted a"modern" (English) education, but
banner in its name which
Significant moment in thisnon-secular
debate that has been - 1s a
contradictions and paradoxes.
against the introduction Outwardly characterised by
the Orientalists
and Persian. of English in India in place of were
Perhaps Sanskrit
position taken by manythey carnestly believed, contrary to the
social reformers in India, that
a gravely this was
in India. mischievous
step to take for the
But the deep-seated identity ofBritish administration
between the Orientalists and the British ideological interests
and the government on one hand
Orientalists and the Anglicists on the other can be seen
in the refusal of all to honour the
by its regional languages. Lookingpresent of India represented
at things in retrospect we
realise that the real dispute was not betwecn the
the Anglicists, but between regional or local Orientalists and
cultures and the big
eventrepresentedby the great tradition of Indianculture that both
the Orientalists and the Anglicists in their
own separate ways
propped up. Macaulay did not want to do business with the
regional languages. As his Minute makes clear, the coloniser's
objective in spreading English education was to form a class of
persons who could be depended upon in interpreting the land
and cuiture of India for the Britisher - a class immortalised in
Macaulay's oft-cited phrase, "Indian in blood and colour, but
English in taste and opinion'". The Orientalists and the Anglicists
both concurred with this view enshrined in the Minute. One might
perceive a subtle transition of intellectual authority taking place
here, a symbolic exchange, so to say, between the past glories
of Sanskrit and the present powers of English. The Orientalists
and through their work the elite public opinion in India
appeared to be conceding the modernised, Anglicised present of
India to the colonial rulers in return for an acknowledgement
of the glories of the country's Vedic and Sanskritic pàst, in a
process that NigelLeask has aptly described, in a related context,
*reverse acculturation. "l4 The process involved a legitimisation
of the colonial rule whose burden it was to recover the past glories
and traditions of India that had fallen into decay arguably under
the Muslim rule. This perhaps is how Said should make sense
to us. For if we followed this logic, what Said said was that the
imperialists used the Orientalist's intellectual mastery over
India's past to legitimise and reinforce their own physical control
of the present.
"Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste and opinion."
Macaulay's telling phrase invites to be deconstructed in the
context of the debates on language carried out with reference
to Indian literature. Was Indian literature, at the time of its
constitution,fashioned out tocater to the taste of the English?
One should assume it was indeed so, as the works that were
circulated in the name of Indian literature in the 19th century
were all classics in Sanskrit that were translated and- inasmuch
as translation constitutes misreading and misrepresentation
misread and misrepresented. Here then is a cartography o
misteading whose founding principles have been the subjectso
debate from very early days. The debate was carried out witt
agreat deal of vehemence in the first half of the 19th century
especially in relation to the rationale of developing an Indiar
literature written specifically in English. The history of India
English literature would reveal that all early Indian Englis!
writers suffered from a profound sense of divided linguisti
identity, so much so that Bankimchandra Chatterjee, the autho
 Epglish. and Michacl Madhusudan
OT the first Indian novel in
make a name for himself as
Dut, onc of the early Indians to renounced, like Ngugiwa
anaccomplished poet in Enelish. both century later, their youthtul
Tniong'O of Kenya was to do a mature
enthusiasm for the English languape andturned, at a more language,
carcers, to their own native
Stage of their respcctivc
Bengali, and distinguished themselvcs as creative writers in that
languagc.
The Language Question
History repcats, and not always as farce, This is what we are
to gather from the recurrence of the debate on the feasibility of
using thc English language by Indians for creative purposes in
post-iniependence India. But what scholars like Budhadev Bose
and P Lal could not prove through their theogctical perambu
lations in the 195SOs and 1960s, thc novclists of Rushdie's gen
eration a few years later have shown through practice: that the
language question, framed as a question pertaining to the per
ceived spontaneity of crcative expression, after all, was a non
questionm as far as the politics of writing was concerncd. Ong could
excel and prove to be a creative genius in an alien language,
evading in the process all questions pertaining to the politics of
writing. This observation gains immense value when we remem
ber that such politics was precisely what Bankimchandra and
MM Dutt were indirectly concerned with when they thought it
fit to reject the English language as the medium of creative
expression in the 19th century. And certainly, one should also
remember that the writers of Rushdie's generation are working
in an altered cultural environment in which literature itself has
been enlisted in the service of an unscrupulous global and
globalised economic order by contemporary capitalism. Since
this is not the place to go into the details of that development,
let us leave that aspect unelaborated for the present.
Thisproblem concerning the language of literature will appear
to be more relevant in adiscussion of Indian literature, as literature
is always written in a specific language. OV Vijayan who brought
about a radical change in the literary sensibility of the Malayalam
readers in the 1960s with his groundbreaking novel Khasakinte
Itihasam (1969), was in the habit of saying that one knows a
region by its characteristic fauna. The variety of fish that one
gets in Chennai willbe different from what one gets in Mumbai,
Tunis or Manchester. A place name can act as a metaphor for
a whole lot of characteristics - and this would include the simell
of the fish one eats - that make up the identity of the people
who inhabit the place. Language, a system of metaphors, at a
certain level can also be treated as a metaphor for the system
built up around aplace.One is known by the language one speaks.
This is one reason why theoristssay that language is ideological.
What this implies for the theorists ofIndian literature, however,
is that an exclusive focus on the language of literature would
render unsustainable formulations like "a literature written in
several languages." One might talk about Hindi literature, Tamil
literature or Bengali literature, because these are kinds of lit
erature based on .specific languages and linguistic cultures.
But can one talk about Indian literature, unless by that one
means, as many 19th century Orientalists did, Sanskrit
literature, or as severalpresent-day western critics mean, Indian
English literature?15
This question emanates centrally from the politics of writing
and in this sense is closcly affiliated to the question that agitated
 the minds of the likes of MM Dutt and Bankimchandra in the
19h century. It is in this context that the observation regarding
the Orientalist constitution of Indian literature becomes a fact
of critical significance. If the real specimens of ndian literaturc
are to be found in the regional languages of India, the chimera
called Indian literature that cxists outside the nation's
linguistic system must be construcd as an invcntion of
somebody. The scholar Nibaranjan Ray has been quite emphatic
about this point. He says:
Literature is absolutcly language-based, and language being a
culturalphenomenon, it is all but wholly conditioned by its locale
and the socio-historical forces that are in operation through the
ages in that particular locale. If that be so, one may reasonably
arguc that the literature of a given language will have its own
specific character of forn andstyle, images and syrmbols, nuances
and associations, ctc.

Politics of Writing
This brings us back to the questions of the politics of writing
and the relation between ideology and literature that were raised
only incidentally in these pages. It may not be possible, either
theoretically or in tems of a cohesive methodology, to carry
forward a sustained argument in support of the presence of an
ontologically related body of knowledge with a shared discursive
history called Indian literature. We can, however., do this by
invoking the ideology of nationalism and the sense of cultural
identity that the project of nationalism during the last phase of
the colonial rule made room for. This precisely was what the
Indian scholars, who took up the task of elaborating a concept
of Indian literature in the 20th century were aiming at. The Tanmil
nationalist poet Subramania Bharati who said that the Indian
nation speaks 18languages, though her chintana [ie, thinking]
is one"»7 was articulating a nationalist position of an essential
Indian spirit animating all the writings from the Indian subcon
tinent that was echoed later in the slogan of the Sahitya Akademi.
Though the full-fledged spirit of nationalism and the politics
implied by it emerge in India only at the turn of the century,
it is possible to argue that the Indologists of the 19th century
were operating within the conceptual framework of the (Indian)
nation, however crude and vague that framework might have
been at that point in time. It is true that it was left for the
nationalists of the 20th century toelaborate that framework. But
was natural for several 19th cèntury Orientalists, inspired as
they were by the spirit of the many newly emergent nations in
Europe vying with each other for cultural capital by making
claims on folk and literary traditions, to invent a glorious past
for theculture ofIndia that was so dear tothem. India thus emerges
as a land-mass of divided interests in the present, but connected
both
by a common and glorious past. Indian literature, then, is
a product of this constructed past and an active agent in the
construction of that past.
The three issues examined above are also crucial for under
standing the dynamics ofthe modernity project in India. For while
talking about Indological scholarship, the debate on language and
the nationalist question, we are in adeeper sense, asking questions
concerning the nature and spread of the colonialism-driven
modernity project and its impact on the country's polity and
culture. Modernityis often regarded as a mindset rather than a
physical condition, or a mindset emerging from a physical
condition, that, in spite of its perils and contradictions,welcomes
 change,growth and progress. Itis an expericnceofunity bind1ng
thecntire humankind togcther, cutting across distinctions ofclass,
caste, race, gender, languageand nationality. Though individual
is important in this dispensation, one is an individual only in
asmuch as he - often he, and seldom she -crystallises within
himselfthe universal, humanistic values sacralised by modernity.
There indeed are contradictions, which account for the demoniac
aspects in the writings of several Europcan romantic and moder
nist writers of the past centuries. Marshall Berman,onc of the
few commentatorsofmodenity who gives a balanced cvaluation
of it, detines it as:
abody of expericnce (that finds) ourselves in an environment
that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of
ourselves and the world and, at the same time, that threatens
to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything
we are. Modem environments and cxpericnces cut acro9s all
boundarics of geography and cthnicity, of class and nationality,
of religion and ideology. 8
Tradition, which is often placed in opposition to modernity
as its other, encompasses the obverse of the above attributes.
Tradition epitomises ignorance, changelessness, narrow
mindedness and lack of power. Traditional India was a compen
dium ofall these vices in British historical accounts. The British
counted it as their historical responsibility as enlightened mem
bers of the civilised world to change this situation. This the
background of the colonialist's grand project of reform and
the accompanying discourse of modernity, complex, contradic
tory and elaborate, in which scholars from both India and
Britain participated with varying degrees of commitment. It
would have been impossible for 19th and early 20th century
scholars from India, whether of the Orientalist, Anglicist, re
formist or nationalist cast of mind, to remain uninfluenced by
this project and this discourse. The contradictions and complexi
ties that we noticed in Indian responses to orientalism and
nationalism are in fact, linked to the divided logic within m0
dernity itself. That is why a Nehruvian nationalist slogan like
"India's unity lies in its diversity" also becomes the credo of
Indian modernity. One need not be exceptionally intelligent to
realise that the slogan "Indian literature is one though written
in many languages" is only the literary critical analogue of the
nationalist modernity's precept concerming India's unity lying
in its diversity.
This genealogy of Indian literature, however, does not pre
ciude, as several scholarspoint out, the presence of myths, legends
and stories, as well as perhaps even patterns of narration of stories,
that have for centuries bound a variety of literature of India
togetherThis may be treated as an aspect of the dialectic of
India's modernity. One might come across myths, motifs and
patterns ofstorytelling that appear and reappear throughout India
in both the ancient and medieval periods of its history. Scholars
like Ayyappa Paniker would say that there is aspecifically Indian
way of narrating stories that has existed in India from the earliest
times.20The Sanskrit stories in the Panchatantra and the epics
of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Pali Jatakakathas, the
Brihatkatha stories written in the Paisachi language, the
Gathasaptasati in Prakrit and the Cilappatkaram and
Manimekalai stories in Tamil have for centuries circulated across
the subcontinent in all languages in various forms and have
remained a perennial source of inspiration for all Indian writers.
In medieval times the Tamil and Kannada 'Bhakti' tradition of
writing that spread from the southern regions of India towards
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