Literature and culture
Elusive Terrain: culture and literary memory
By Meenakshi Mukherjee, 200 pages, OUP, 2008
Now and then, it is nice to read a book by specialist on topics like literature and culture. Meenakshi Mukherjee is a veteran academic specialising in contemporary Indian literature. Both in the Indian languages and that is more important than just talking about the Indians writing in English. This is what she has done and enjoyed reading the essays compiled into a book.
Some of the topics might interest many readers. Indian films in English, Internal Diaspora, Hindi to Bangla, Literary debates in India in the last half century, Narrating a nation and history and imagined history etc.
The book stirs our thoughts and kindles our imagination. A very pleasant read, indeed.
Almost all the topics interested me, English in an uneven land, that is the way the English language has come to occupy a central place in the lives of the privileged and the less privileged. There is now widespread learning and the use of this language and now a new India, those living in the USA and UK and making a new life of comfort and exile, yes, the word exile catches the reality, though the use of the word, Diaspora, I found repelling! At least for me! So, readers would find my use of English a bit old-fashioned, old-fashioned I remain in many other aspects as well, in holding on to my own views of what English language means to me and also how I hold others who write and make a living abroad.
As I live in India and committed to the success and failure of what India means and I still see the exiles as a class apart from the native Indians.
I give weight more for the native Indians than for others like V.S.Naipaul who have their own bees in their bonnets.
I am not going into the very specific points raised by the author and that is interesting but the point I want to make here is that still, that is even now, after Britain had departed from the Indian shores, there is this perception that in Britain they don’t seem to have come to recognise the Indian literary successes, like Salmon Rushdie and Naipaul as mainstream writers, there is the classifications and categories as black literature, colonial literature etc. There is this racial perception and it seems it is hard to go. She quotes Susan Sontang for writing in the Times Literary Supplement (13 June 2003) saying that English had contributed to the disappearance of many “lesser” languages of the world. I am glad to find Ms.Mukherjee criticises this view. Slave trade first, (for 3 centuries) then, the indentured labour migration saw, Africans and Indians migrate in large numbers and the result is the current race and religious intolerance we noticed in UK and France, to cite just the two advanced countries. There is also the shift in the use of English in India by the new generation to displace jobs in the USA and elsewhere and also the English publishing that sees more English books published in India but not bought by the West but mainly for the domestic readers. She cites a book by Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (2004) which profiles the racial and other factors that discriminate against writers and literary activities taking three forms, linguistic, literary and political, the last taking on an economic cast.
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“”When will that shore appear from which at last we see..How all this came to pass and for what reason?”