Under The Bhasha Gaze Modernity and Indian Literature PP Raveendran All Chapter

Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and
Indian Literature Pp Raveendran

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/under-the-bhasha-gaze-modernity-and-indian-literatur
e-pp-raveendran/
Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature
PP Raveendran
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192871558.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780191967801 Print ISBN: 9780192871558
FRONT MATTER
Copyright Page 
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192871558.002.0003 Page iv
Published: February 2023
Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© PP Raveendran 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2023
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913249
ISBN 978–0–19–287155–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871558.001.0001
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Preface
This book is an outcome of my long-standing interest in Indian litera-

ture and modernity studies, areas that have engaged my focused atten-
tion particularly over the past two decades. Its origin is as a collection
of independent essays, some of them written as papers for seminars and
conferences organized by universities and other institutions such as the
Sahitya Akademi. However, even as separate essays, they are connected
by a common logic—a counter-logic, perhaps—that is also shared by
a number of scholars from diverse Indian bhashas working in the field
of Indian literature today. I have certainly benefited from my inter-
action with some of them during the long period of the book’s gesta-
tion. I know that it is not possible to name all the colleagues and fellow
scholars who responded to my arguments when they were first presented
at conferences. Let me, however, acknowledge the role of a few scholar
friends who, either as organizers of conferences or as editors of publi-
cations, provided the initial impetus that led to the writing of the earlier
versions of some of the chapters: Ipshita Chanda, Subha Chakrabarty
Dasgupta, Amiya Dev, P.C. Kar, Mini Krishnan, Udaya Kumar, Jayanta
Mahapatra, E.V. Ramakrishnan, K. Satchidanandan, and Harish Trivedi.
Let me also remember two scholar friends who are no longer with us
today: Meena Alexander and Avadhesh Kumar Singh. I am also thankful
to P. Madhavan, K.M. Krishnan, and K.M. Seethi for reading and com-
menting on some of the chapters. I am thankful to E.V. Fathima whose
draft translation of an essay that I originally wrote in Malayalam formed
the basis for the analysis in one of the chapters. Most chapters are devel-
oped from critical essays written over the years, some of them published,
some unpublished. Some of the material assembled in the book was col-
lected while I was holding a UGC Emeritus Fellowship (2014–2016) at
the School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University. I am thankful to the
successive generations of postgraduate and research students of the past
few years at the School of Letters, who formed the initial audiences for
the ideas presented here. Several of the Malayalam books listed in the
viii Preface
bibliography were ferreted out for me by Mini G. Pillai and R. Saritha
from the collections of rare books in the Mahatma Gandhi University
Library. I am also thankful to the three unknown readers from the Oxford
University Press who had provided useful comments on the book. The
bibliography is an indication of my appreciation of the strong tradition
of scholarship on Indian literature and modernity studies, to which I am
indeed in great debt.
As always, Sherine has been the first to read this book, which she did
with her sharp critical gaze. I am thankful to her as well as to Aparna
for meticulously going through the typescript before it was sent to the
printer.
Because of the book’s origin as a collection of essays written over a pe-
riod of time, it would be natural and inevitable for certain key ideas to be
repeated in parts of the work. Though caution has been taken at the time
of editing to erase repetitions, I would not be surprised if the reader still
comes across a few instances of arguments being repeated over chapters. I
crave the reader’s indulgence in this matter. As regards the quotations ap-
pearing in the book, whenever I cite works from Indian languages other
than Malayalam, I have taken care to use standard translations available.
As for the translations from Malayalam, they are invariably mine, except
where I have specifically mentioned other translators.
P.P. Raveendran
Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and Indian Literature
PP Raveendran
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192871558.001.0001
Published: 2023 Online ISBN: 9780191967801 Prin BN: 9780192871558
FRONT MATTER
Acknowledgements 
Published: February 2023
Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
The author wishes to acknowledge the following publications in which lier versions of some of the
chapters were printed, as detailed below:
Chapter 5: Methodology in Translating Pre-modern Texts, ed. C. Nagan Bengaluru: Sahitya Akademi,
2017. (The essay originally titled ‘Translation as Rewriting: Coloniali , Modernity and the Idea of
Literature’)
Chapter 6: Indian Literature, No. 252 (July–August 2009) (The essay o inally titled ‘Decolonization and
the Dynamics of Translation: An Essay in Historical Poetics’)
Chapter 10: Literary Criticism in India: Texts, Trends and Trajectories, ed V Ramakrishnan. New Delhi:
Sahitya Akademi, 2021. (The essay originally titled ‘Modernity and I anence: The Contexts of Kesari
Balakrishna Pillai’)
Chapter 11: Chandrabhaga, No. 16 (2018) (The essay originally titled ‘ ere is Bharatvarsha? Region and
Nation in Indian Poetry’)
Chapter 12: Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 14 (2014) (The ess originally titled ‘Bilingualism and
the Everyday: Bhakti and Vibhakti in Indian Writing in English’)
Chapter 16: S.K. Pottekkat, The Story of the Time-piece: A Collection of S rt Stories. Trans. Venugopal
Menon. New Delhi: Niyogi Books. (Foreword titled ‘SK Pottekkat: Writing as Fantasy Travel’)
Chapter 18: Rajelakshmy, A Path and Many Shadows and Twelve Stories. Trans. RK Jayasree. Hyderabad:
Orient BlackSwan. (Introduction titled ‘Rajelakshmy: The Tale and the Teller’)
p. x
Introduction: Bhasha in Focus
This is a study of Indian literature in the context of recent discussions

on modernity and its theoretical extensions such as the everyday and
the social and historical imaginary. The book in essence is an analysis of
the aesthetics and politics of modernity as they are embodied in Indian
bhasha literatures of the past two centuries. Exploring the trajectory of
modernity after Indian literature came into contact with colonialism in
the early nineteenth century is indeed the primary object of the book,
though the intricate ways in which the bhasha imagination negotiated
questions clustering around such concepts as the literary, the historical,
and the social as part of the encounter receive more focused attention in
the enquiry. Though the work acknowledges the European provenance
of modernity as a historical idea, it also recognizes the inherent com-
plexity of the concept and its uneven and equivocal connotations when
used with reference to particular cultures outside Europe, especially with
reference to the bhasha communities in India. Theoretical issues debated
in relation to modernity such as its conceptual affinities with the western
enlightenment project, its ideological investment in European aesthetics,
and its implication for the evolution and development of Indian litera-
tures are important for the study. The work also examines the local and
regional strengths of the literary imagination that turns everyday ex-
periences into aesthetically significant bhasha events. The critique of the
idea of the aesthetic—hermetic aesthetic, as it is sometimes described
in these pages—in this process, undergoes a radical transformation that
assigns a new political force to the act of writing. Although the book is
concerned with issues pertaining to Indian literatures in general, the the-
oretical postulates undergirding it are illustrated with the help primarily
of Malayalam literature, with supplementary inputs from other bhasha
literatures and Indian English literature.
Under the Bhasha Gaze. PP Raveendran, Oxford University Press. © PP Raveendran 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871558.003.0001
2 Under the Bhasha Gaze
‘Modernity’ is understood here not as a singular event, but as a com-
plex and layered phenomenon that manifests across languages, both
in India and abroad, in multiple forms. Traditionally, especially in the
European context, modernity used to be identified with the breakdown of
the feudal order and the emergence of new social formations in the wake
of large-scale industrialization. It is this understanding of modernity
that Anthony Giddens draws upon when he formulates a preliminary
definition for it: ‘Modernity refers to modes of social life or organiza-
tion which emerged in Europe from around the seventeenth century on-
wards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their
influence’ (1990: 1). The assumption here is that modernity is a universal
state of being towards which all cultures travel, discarding past beliefs.
This monolithic view of modernity certainly is important in the history
of contemporary social theory. However, one cannot ignore the fact that
this view is under challenge from various quarters today, both on account
of its Euro-centric bias and its positivistic orientation. On the one hand,
while there are important thinkers such as Perry Anderson (1984) and
Bruno Latour (1993) who consider modernity more as a matter of faith
or misrecognition and who question its conceptual and historical bases,
there are also writers like K.M. Panikkar (1953), Walter Rodney (1972),
and Eduardo Galeano (1973) who, on the other hand, draw attention to
the grave injustice it has perpetrated on the people of Asia, Africa, and
South America. Besides, as argued by scholars like Shmuel Eisenstadt
and Lawrence Grossberg who talk about multiple and, especially non-
western, modernities, while one is justified in granting ‘historical prece-
dence’ and status as a point of reference to the western form, it can by
no means be regarded as the only ‘authentic’ version of modernity today
(Eisenstadt 2000: 2–3). Modernity can manifest in diverse forms across
cultures, and it is not imperative that it should have an adversarial relation
with tradition in all societies. There could be interpenetrations between
the values connected with tradition and modernity in specific societies,
situations that might prompt one to be suspicious of simplistic definitions
that consider ‘modern’ to be wholly and exclusively non-traditional and
‘traditional’ as everything that is dated and obsolete. One might do well
to remember in this context that the social awakening in India associated
with such ‘traditional’ figures as the Buddha, Tiruvalluvar, the poets affili-
ated to the medieval Bhakti movement, or saints of modern times like Sri
Introduction 3
Narayana Guru can also be regarded as constituting important moments
in the evolution of distinctively Indian versions of modernity.
The present study, therefore, adopts the idea of a proliferation of mod-
ernities as a way of dealing with the concept’s nuanced, contested, and
contradictory character. While modernity’s leverage as a desirable term
for a mindset promoting liberal, enlightened, and scientific vision is in-
deed valuable, it is impossible to ignore its negative meaning as a rep-
resentation of the language of ‘tyranny’ associated with the discourse
of western rationality. This is where one feels compelled to talk about
an Indian context for modernity in which concepts such as ‘everyday’,
‘worldliness’, ‘sociality’, ‘secularism’, ‘bilingualism’, ‘polyphony’, ‘democ-
racy’, ‘resistance’, ‘nationalism’, and so on gain varied and vibrant reson-
ances. These and other terms are used in this study not in any narrowly
defined sense in which specific theorists might have used them in their
formulations, but are deployed in a larger, often non-European, context
where one can interweave questions of history, culture, and politics with
literary texts. The idea of the historical and the social in this context can
be seen entering into a critical dialogue with concepts such as ‘ideology’,
‘hegemony’, ‘habitus’, and ‘social imaginary’ as well as with their more re-
cent variants appearing in the writings of such social thinkers as Michel
Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Romila Thapar, Partha
Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Charles Taylor, Edward Said, Arjun
Appadurai, and several others.
The concept of the ‘everyday’ that figures prominently in these pages,
though borrowed from the social theory of Henri Lefebvre, is used here
to describe bhasha literatures’ interest not only in the ordinary and the
non-elite, but in forms and structures that would allow a sense of this-
worldliness to be worked into the conception of literature. Though
the principles of art as handed down to Indian literary scholarship by
western aesthetics leave little room for an understanding of literature in
non-esoteric terms, it is art’s turn to the social and the everyday that has
arguably allowed bhasha literatures to weave new forms of critical con-
sciousness into the experience of literature at various stages of the evo-
lution of modernity in India. It is in this sense that the everyday signals
the advent of a new epistemology concerned with the representation of
immanent objects rather than of a transcendent reality, and implies the
emergence of a new aesthetic that is geared to a radical understanding of
culture. Lefebvre makes a distinction between ‘everyday’ and ‘daily life’,
and alludes, echoing in some sense Baudelaire’s definition of the ‘modern’,
to the transience and impermanence of the mundane and the common-
place. The everyday, as he sees it, is what is excluded from philosophy, and
it is this exclusion that accounts for its departure from elite responses and
forms of thought, including art and literature of the esoteric kind. This is
what makes modernity’s relation with high art and elite literature a matter
of concern in considerations of the sociology of writing. Also, while the
everyday represents the quotidian at the temporal level, it can also get
spatialized in artworks and literary pieces to include the minor and the
marginalized. Art and literature in the past revelled in epic and philo-
sophical themes expressed in a grand, secure, and self-assured language,
but the advent of modernity in the alternative sense cited here appeared
to pose severe threats to this security and self-assurance.
The theoretically sensitive cultural deliberation that the book repre-
sents cannot be divorced from the postcolonial and comparative reading
of texts and trends from diverse Indian bhashas being carried out by
countless scholars in Indian languages today. In that sense, the book may
also be regarded as an attempt at formulating a new critical paradigm
for the study of Indian literature from a comparative and interliterary
perspective. The repeated references made herein to the bilingualism
and multilingualism inherent to the Indian literary ethos would per-
haps require further comment. Though one might differ on the precise
ways in which the presence of multilingualism in the literary imagin-
ation was theorized in ancient days, no one would dare to contest, in the
face of historical evidence unearthed from both literary and non-literary
sources, that exchanges between languages and literatures in India in the
past were considerable. Such exchanges indeed went beyond instances
of women and the working-class speaking Prakrit in ancient Sanskrit
drama, or of the manifestations of linguistic hybridity in medieval and
early modern South Indian literatures, especially Malayalam literature,
whose Manipravalam traditions are being subjected to fresh critical scru-
tiny by cultural studies scholars today. It seems to have been natural for
an Indian text in the past to move from one language to another in the
form of what we today broadly describe as ‘translation’, but which circu-
lated through narrative reconstructions realized, sometimes in the name
of literature, but more often in the name of devotional songs, oral tales,
Introduction 5
moral fables, and hagiographies. This certainly was a question that Indian
scholars such as Buddhadev Bose, Sisir Kumar Das, Sujit Mukherjee,
A.K. Ramanujan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Namvar
Singh, and Ayyappa Paniker who did pioneering work in comparative lit-
erature in the past were serious about, but who, in the absence of material
evidence from individual languages, apparently could not make much
headway in their efforts. The situation, to be sure, has improved in re-
cent days, primarily because of the significant work that is being done in
several bhashas today, not by literary scholars alone, but by historians,
social scientists, folklorists, and cultural studies specialists as well. In the
light of the new developments, one might feel compelled to reimagine the
literary landscape of premodern and modern India as a dynamic terrain
marked by interliterary exchanges and the circulation of texts and ideas
across cultures. One might also be persuaded to consider the polyphonic
culture associated with the Indian creative mind as an integral character-
istic of Indian modernity.
No exaggerated significance needs to be read into the use of the word
bhasha in the title or in the text. It is significant to the extent that bhasha,
its root sense of expressive lucidity apart, is the common word for ‘speech’
or ‘a regional dialect’ in most Indian languages, especially when used in
opposition to the hegemonic language of Sanskrit. Sometimes the term
is used as an affix to indicate the translation in the regional language of
a well-known text in Sanskrit as, for example, in Bhasha Kautaliyam, the
twelfth-century Malayalam rewriting of Kautilya’s Arthasasthra. In pre-
modern times, when the word appears prefixed or suffixed to the title of
a literary work, it invariably means a non-Sanskritic work as in Bhasha
Bhushan, the seventeenth century Hindi treatise on poetics by Jaswant
Singh, Gita-govinda Bhasha, the seventeenth-century Maithili trans-
lation of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, or Bhasha Naishadham Champu,
the eighteenth-century Malayalam retelling of the story of Nala by
Mazhamangalath Nampoothiri. The word indeed is of Sanskrit origin,
though its anti-hegemonic thrust in the Indian linguistic context con-
fers on it a degree of political power. There are a few more implications
that the word has gained from its historically evolving semantic environ-
ment that might further deepen its political potential. One of these is that
the word is sometimes used in opposition to chandah or a Vedic verse,
and in that sense, enjoys a lowly status in the hierarchically organized
order of linguistic practice in past societies. It is possible that the inferior
status of bhasha in relation to Sanskrit as a language is an extension of
this. Added to this is the fact that the corresponding word for bhasha that
the colonial officers used in the imperial days was ‘vernacular’, a word
that originally signified a Latinate dialect spoken by domestic slaves in
ancient Roman provinces. In the past, bhashas often implied languages
used by the common people both for day-to-day communication and
for the oral rendering of tales and narratives in a multilingual ambience,
for which the dominant languages of Sanskrit, and later, English, had
remained unavailable. Bhasha can also signify the possibility of inter-
pretive plurality, especially in the expression bhashya, where it suggests
a ‘vernacular’ reading of a master text in Sanskrit. Perhaps it was the pol-
itical significance that the word acquired from these and other aspects
of its semantic context that prompted Indian scholars critical of the he-
gemony of Sanskrit to use the word bhasha with reference to the litera-
ture written in the regional languages. ‘With such happenings a profound
egalitarian impulse entered the hegemonic structure of Indian society’,
says Ananthamurthy, one of the earliest to use the word in this sense
(2014: 81). It is the subaltern and resistance potential implied by the term
bhasha that this book seeks to draw upon in talking about bhasha litera-
ture and the bhasha gaze.
The perspective outlined here should certainly provide a new critical
angle to the scholar engaged in the study of the interaction between lan-
guage, history, identity, power, subjectivity, culture, genre, gender, region,
nation, tradition, fantasy, and imagination—elements that contribute to-
wards the making of the ideology of a people. Questions pertaining to
the social, the marginal, the literary, the colonial, and the postcolonial,
when deployed in the specific context of the construction and evolution
of literary cultures in Indian bhashas will also be viewed differently in
the altered environment. Inasmuch as the matter impinges on the im-
aginary constitution of the Indian nation with its inevitable entangle-
ments with the larger, international world, this is not merely a literary
question, but is one that is deeply political in import. It is this import that
scholars like A.K. Ramanujan, Amiya Dev, Bhalchandra Nemade, Ngugi
wa Thiong’O, Ganesh Devy, and others recognize when they choose to
talk critically about the border-crossing function of literature, whether
the concept debated is Indian literature or world literature. The kind of
Introduction 7
aesthetic abstraction that accompanies the iconization and canonization
of literary texts, in this context, perhaps cannot be looked upon as the
norm in Indian literature. Though such abstractions and iconizations
might suit the tyrannical purposes of colonial modernity, what manifests
in Indian bhasha literatures of the modern period, enriched as they are
with the culture of polyphony as well as the architecture of the social and
the everyday, is a drift away from aesthetic abstraction towards a more
concrete and politically significant articulation of experience.
It is as an expression of the understanding of the literary process
described above that the present book has been conceived and de-
signed. Though the chapters that constitute the study have their
origin as independent essays written over the past decade, they are
held together in the present volume by the subtle political connec-
tion mentioned above. All the chapters have been reworked thor-
oughly for the present publication, so that their originals exist only
as spectral presences in them. The book itself is divided into three
sections, the first two consisting of seven chapters and the third of
six chapters: Section I: Historicizing Bhasha Literature; Section
II: Border-Crossing Bhasha Literature; and Section III: Six Ways of
Being Modern: Reading a Bhasha Canon.
The key concepts around which the discussion in the book turns have
been broached and elaborated in the chapters forming Section I. The ar-
guments here seek to historicize bhasha literatures, and are set against a
broad canvas. The section establishes the book’s general perspective on
Indian literature and inquires into the various ways in which bhasha lit-
eratures engaged with modernity both as a concept and as an aspect of
reality during the colonial and postcolonial periods. The deliberations
carried out, however, are not exclusively theoretical, because what the
chapters in this section attempt to do in essence is throw open the con-
ceptual world, before letting it fuse gently with the larger literary cosmos
of Indian bhashas. Specimens from Indian literature come alive in these
chapters against the dynamic background of a world of cultural inter-
action where concepts like the everyday, the social imaginary, the her-
metic aesthetic, translation, decolonization, literary history, and so on
cease to be articulations of pure theory with no connection with lived
and imagined reality. Thus in the first three chapters titled ‘Modernity
and Indian Literature’, ‘The Everyday as Modernity’, and ‘Print Capitalism
and Modernity’, the bhasha-centred resonances associated with specific
concepts are illustrated with copious examples from Indian literatures,
especially from the Malayalam missionary literature of the nineteenth
century, as well as from writings and translations from Malayalam and
Indian English. Chapters 1 and 2 try to make sense of Indian modernity
by scrutinizing the signals of everydayness animating the specimens of
bhasha writing and by analysing the spirit of pluralism and secularism
that they are imbued with. Chapter 3 takes up the question of the evolu-
tion of printed prose as a medium of creative communication in Indian
languages in the nineteenth century which, even as it can be interpreted
as a process marking the passage from the traditional to the modern,
can also be construed as indicating the advent of a logic that disregards
the emotional make-up of the colonized subject. Chapter 4, titled ‘The
Literary Process and the Social Imaginary’ critically examines the evolu-
tion of twentieth-century Malayalam poetry as a prototype of the history
of modern Indian literature. The chapter reveals that the successive stages
of nationalist-progressive writing, modernist writing, and postmodernist
writing, which are stereotypically represented as following one after the
other in literary history are to be viewed in fact as expressions of contests
and contradictions within the social imaginary surrounding the Indian
literary mind. Though literary history in a narrowly defined sense cannot
be considered the main focus of attention in these four chapters, their
implication in the debates on the literary evolution of India can hardly
be overlooked. Questions concerning literary history loom large in the
remaining chapters of the section too. The principles underlying transla-
tion in Indian literary history are debated in all their inherent complexity
in Chapters 5 and 6, titled, respectively, ‘Translation and Literary History’
and ‘Decolonizing Translation’. These two chapters chart the epistemo-
logical connection between modernity and translation. Inasmuch as
translation is understood as a matter concerning truth, the two chapters
examine how re-writing truth in diverse ways has been of prime concern
to literary traditions in bhashas. There certainly is the dominant view that
the Indian novels and prose translations of the nineteenth century were
merely translating western modernity into the language of the colonized.
On the other hand, one might also look upon these specimens as con-
tinuing the practices and traditions of literary re-writing that were strong
in several Indian languages from the days of antiquity. These and other
Introduction 9
reflections on the dynamics of translation directed at an expansion of
the universe of literary experience might also warrant a rethinking of the
idea of world literature, which is carried out in Chapter 7, titled ‘Bhasha
Writing as World Literature’.
Section II examines Indian literature from a comparativist per-
spective. The chapters forming this section are text-and-author-based
readings rather than concept-based analyses, and they discuss the is-
sues raised in the earlier section from a more closely focused, albeit
pan-Indian, perspective. The section opens with Chapter 8, ‘Towards a
Comparative Indian Literature’, which initiates a discussion of the gen-
eral problems connected with reading bhasha literatures in comparison.
The chapter examines the radical ways in which the idea of comparative
literature has been rethought in recent days to incorporate into it the les-
sons of the cultural turn that of late has overtaken literary studies. The
approach certainly is important for the study of Indian literature with
its ambivalent attitude to colonial modernity and its inbuilt polyphonic
dynamic. The finer details of this are explored in the subsequent chap-
ters. Chapters 9, ‘Realism in the Bhasha Novel: The Case of Paraja’, and
Chapter 10, ‘Modernity and Kesari’s Ambivalences’ dealing, respect-
ively, with Gopinath Mohanty’s pre-Independence Odia novel Paraja
and Malayalam scholar Kesari Balakrishna Pillai’s critical essays of the
same period, are particularly significant in this regard, for the reason
that they both illustrate the schism and divide in the modern Indian
psyche through their ambivalent attitudes to colonial modernity. The
ambivalence is evident in the writers’ attitude to progress and their vi-
sion, of the future in the case of Mohanty and of the present in the case
of Kesari. Mohanty repudiates the Progressive Writers’ Association’s
official interpretation of progress, while Kesari endorses it through his
acquiescence in the idea of modernity-as-the-present. Both writers in
this sense throw light on the divide in the idea of modernity. Versions
of the divide continue to persist in the post-Independence Indian mind,
as is demonstrated by the discussion in Chapter 11, titled ‘Region and
Nation in Bhasha Poetry’ that follows. The chapter provides an analysis
of the conflicted relationship between the nation and the region as it ap-
pears in selected bhasha poems from the languages of the Northeast as
well as from Bengali, Odia, Telugu, and Malayalam. Though modernity’s
schism is what surfaces as the rift between the local and the national in
the poems reviewed in this chapter, the discussion also demonstrates
that the democratic and egalitarian spirit that underlies bhasha litera-
tures is strong enough to thwart attempts at cultural tyranny by the ad-
vocates of hyper-nationalism. Chapter 12, titled ‘The Bilingual Everyday
in Bhasha Literature’, examines the issue of bilingualism in relation to
Indian literatures as they attempt to articulate questions concerning the
everyday. The chapter has a special focus on Indian English writing, as
it is the literature written in the English language that often raises the
question of bilingualism as a point of debate. This chapter also deals in
a sense with the schism discussed, as crucial to the debate carried out
here is the identification of a maimed language that is directly con-
nected to English’s emotional aloofness from Indian bhashas. The
bhashas are quite fortunate in this respect because of the innately multi-
lingual contexts in which they thrive. They enrich each other by a mu-
tual interanimation of the rhythms and cadences of individual bhashas.
Chapter 13, titled ‘Modernity and Literary Historiography’, is an attempt
to explore the possibilities of conceiving a critical literary historiography
that would stay clear of the colonial cultural baggage that trammels
available models of non-western literary historiography. Chapter 14, ‘A
Latin American Moment in Indian Fiction’, again, is an examination of
selected works from Indian literature read in comparison with a selec-
tion of Latin American writing. The method of reading texts in com-
parison adopted in this chapter indeed has been the main burden of the
discussions carried out in Section II as a whole.
The chapters in Section III are attempts at revisiting a bhasha canon,
which in the present instance happens to be the Malayalam literary canon
of the twentieth century. Six authors are examined in this section, each
representing a seminal aspect of Indian modernity that has not been dis-
cussed in detail in the previous sections. The authors discussed are M.T.
Vasudevan Nair, S.K. Pottekkat, O.V. Vijayan, Rajelakshmy, Ayyappa
Paniker, and Madhavikkutty/Kamala Das, all canonical figures, whose
works exemplify the strengths and weaknesses as well as the conflicts and
contradictions that are identified as markers of modern Indian litera-
ture. Each chapter, even as it enumerates the salient characteristics of an
author’s output that might persuade one to place him/her in what can be
described the ‘modern’ tradition in the language, also aims at a compre-
hensive assessment of the writer as a bhasha artist. The Epilogue, a kind
Introduction 11
of coda to the volume, is a two-pronged reminder to the reader: a fairly
sober reminder to the general reader of the fact that no ‘literary’ question
can stay purely literary forever and, more particularly, a somewhat grim
reminder specifically to the Indian reader of the troubled modern times
in which she lives. The moral that one might draw from the Epilogue is
clear: perhaps the calm confidence regarding the almost absolute impos-
sibility of the emergence of linguistic fascism in the multilingual Indian
context might appear to be illusory, given the fact of the more direct
threat that the idea of Indian modernity is facing at the cultural–political
level today.
1
Modernity and Indian Literature
Modernity is a complex concept that subsumes within itself a number of

conflicting and contradictory ideas. At a preliminary level, it signifies the
condition of being new and radically up-to-date, making one feel aloof in
time from one’s past. Defined historically and somewhat narrowly, it is a
term that refers to diverse aspects of the physical and mental architecture
of the new world that emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth century,
and then spread to the rest of the world in subsequent centuries. In this
sense, the term would cover both the technological developments of the
period and the advances in knowledge and worldview made by society,
and would imply an individual mindset that promotes the positive values
of humanism, liberalism, enlightenment, scientificity, and secularism.
The rise of urban and industrial culture, expansion of capitalism and co-
lonialism, proliferation of the human sciences, and the evolution of bur-
eaucracy would also be treated as part of the development of modernity.
As a corollary to all this, the term has also acquired a mildly negative
connotation as suggesting the language of ‘tyranny’ connected with the
western discourse of rationality. Its association with temporal conscious-
ness further alludes to its distance from tradition, generally counted as
its opposite. Tradition and modernity, however, cannot be regarded as
absolute and incompatible ideas that exclude each other, and it is this
interconnection that makes modernity a complex phenomenon. As was
pointed out in the Introduction, there is a clear interdependence of the
values connected with tradition and modernity in concrete situations,
prompting one to be suspicious of naive definitions that consider the
‘modern’ as wholly and exclusively non-traditional and the ‘traditional’ as
everything that is obsolete and unmodern. One can be modern without
being non-traditional, an idea that is being increasingly pursued in dis-
cussions of non-western, indigenous, and alternative versions of mod-
ernity. There is a good deal of published scholarship on this question in
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871558.003.0002
circulation today, with reference especially to history and literature (e.g.,
Chatterjee 1997; Eisenstadt 2000; Chakrabarty 2001; Mohanty 2011).
Though the Europeanizing impulse underlying the colonial mod-
ernity project has been the focus of attention in debates on modernity,
one must be sensitive to the presence of premodern, non-European tra-
ditions of radical social reform that can only be interpreted in terms of
the aforementioned alternative versions, whose tenets run counter to the
idea of a monolithic modernity project. No serious social theorist would
nowadays talk about ‘a singular modernity’, though the theorist of post-
modernity who used that phrase as the title of his work on modernity is
fully aware of the complexity of the issue (Jameson 2002). ‘Modernity
is a historical fact, but each culture has its own native modernity, a desi
modernity’, writes Bhalchandra Nemade (2009: 14). ‘To think through
the possibilities of refusing euro-modernity’, according to Lawrence
Grossberg, has become a primary concern of much of the non-European
world today (2012: 73). Making his case for a precolonial bhasha mod-
ernity without actually naming it so, G.N. Devy suggests, choosing his
words cautiously and quoting critic R.B. Patankar, that ‘India might have
brought itself to the threshold of modernity even without the British im-
pact’ (1992: 56). Most alternative theories are capable of unsettling the
central principles undergirding western modernity, whose discourse is
being critically scrutinized for emblems that invoke its implication in
the imperialist ideology. Scholars are also becoming increasingly aware
of Europe’s continuing efforts at appropriating historiography in a glo-
balized environment where, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, Europe has
for long been geographically ‘provincialized’ by history (Chakrabarty
2001: 3). Even models of ‘rational’ language, of the finest order, can be
shown to have existed in the non-European world. An example is that of
the fourteenth–fifteenth century Malayalam mathematician Jyeshtadeva,
whose Yuktibhasha (Rational Language) is today regarded as ‘the first
book of calculus in the world’ (Gurukkal 2019: 95). In this context, the
ideas of ‘reason’, ‘enlightenment’, and ‘renaissance’, sometimes proffered
as the distinguishing characteristics of western modernity, may acquire
new resonances in relation to the social trends in non-European cultures
as, for example, in relation to the cultural awakening in India at the time
of the Buddha, Tiruvalluvar, Basavanna, or Tukaram.
Modernity and Indian Literature 17
What this points to is the difficulty in treating modernity as an idea
exclusively connected with the ‘modernization’ efforts initiated by the co-
lonial forces. However, we should not also ignore the hegemonic form
of modernity that exerted tremendous influence on the constitution of
the idea of Indian literature. The Euro-centric sense in which the term
has generally been used in scholarly discussions till recently also cannot
be overlooked. Because of the ‘universalizing’ tendency associated with
dominant versions of modernity, we see an open contradiction, an in-
ternal divide develops within the concept when we propose an Indian
version of it.1 The hegemonic version would not, theoretically at least,
allow for other roads to modernity, other than what has been prescribed
by the dominant European form, and any deviation from this would ap-
pear to be a methodological flaw. Hence the divide in the conception of
modernity, which appears as a schism between a few binaries—between
the global and the national, the national and the regional, the abstract
and the concrete, the secular and the non-secular, the eternal and the
everyday, and the elite and the popular. Perhaps the schism itself is a
primary characteristic of Indian modernity, suspended as it is between
a monolithically organized power and a heterogeneously distributed
agency. Indigenous ideas force themselves into Indian modernity
through this schism and serve as an effective agency, resisting the powers
of Euro-centrism and colonial domination. Modernity in the European
context, after all, implies a social upheaval arising from a repudiation of
the past, whereas the multiple forms of Indian modernity, even as they
aim at a total overhauling of the culture by rejecting what is unhealthy
in the past, also attempt to reconstitute the self by recovering from the
past the memory of their struggles over history and cultural identity. As
Walter Benjamin said in a famous passage, retrieving the past historic-
ally would mean recapturing ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger’ (1973: 257). This is a difficult process, a process marked by ten-
sions and contradictions, and taking place, especially in the contem-
porary world situation, in a site that is shared by cultural agencies with
1 The position on modernity outlined here is developed from the arguments given in the
Introduction to my Texts, Histories, Geographies: Reading Indian Literature (Raveendran

2009a: 1–12) and the essay ‘Modernity and Knowledge Production: Malayalam Thought
Processes in the Modern Period’, in Science, Literature and Aesthetics, (ed.) Amiya Dev
(Raveendran 2009b: 744–767).
diverse, even antagonistic, ideological, and economic interests. It is the
schism in modernity mentioned above that acts as a sort of buffer against
the pressure emanating from these tensions and antagonisms. One might
attempt to gauge the intensity of this schism as it narrows down in the
Indian context, particularly at the site where colonial modernity comes
into contact with literature and aesthetics.
There is ample reason for conceiving an Indian version of modernity
as a heterogeneous compendium of pluralistic cultural strands. One of
the pre-eminent senses in which modernity as a concept has been under-
stood is as a secularizing process, where secularism carries with it the
suggestion of a belief in the worldliness of experience as opposed to the
hope for a transcendental resolution. The notion of this-worldliness is
important in unravelling Indian modernity because of the pivotal role
that the decentred cluster of cultural symbols and images drawn from
diverse material constituents can play in a secular society’s imagination.
Where Indian modernity differs from its western counterpart, basically,
is in the way it maintains a critical relation with a pluralistic tradition of
values as an aspect of the modernity project itself. If the cultural tyranny
associated with western modernity appears somewhat impotent in the
Indian context, it is essentially because of the recognition of the country’s
inbuilt cultural pluralism, a characteristic that constitutes the modern
Indian nation as well as the social imaginary surrounding the Indian lit-
erary mind.
One will have to consider, along with the internal schism that is part
of the modernity project in India, the ‘dialectic’ of modernity that has
shaped the logic of its progress in the present-day world (Adorno and
Horkheimer 2002). The operation of this dialectic has been very crucial
in the constitution of the modern Indian subject practising literature.
The important point to note here is that it is an already fractured sub-
ject that gains entry into the texts of Indian bhasha literatures. The con-
crete manifestations of this fracture are multiform, as indicated by the
powerful articulations of feminist, Dalit, folk, and tribal consciousness
in the bhasha literary scene today. Inasmuch as modernity in its vintage
form swore by a monolithic literary experience that was autonomous
and self-validating, the emergence of Dalit, folk, and feminist expressive
forms that validated themselves with reference to ‘extra-literary’ experi-
ences could be regarded as a manifestation of modernity’s dialectic that
entails its eventual disintegration. The cultural pluralism characterizing
the Indian social imaginary indeed is sufficient to justify the presence of
these trends, though one might legitimately wonder why it has taken so
long for such trends to appear in the public realm. Modernity’s dialectic
might perhaps be able to explain this delay too. Connected with this is
also the idea of the degeneration of the spirit of modernity at the histor-
ical level. The suggestion here is that modernity is doomed from the very
beginning by its own inner logic, because acquisition of knowledge, a
function of modernity, would invariably lead to forms of tyranny that,
in order to sustain themselves, would breed myths that could invalidate
both modernity and knowledge.
To probe a little further into the recent invasion of the Indian creative
imagination by new forms of literary consciousness, one might examine
how these forms constitute a departure from the dominant literary prac-
tice connected with colonial modernity. If modernity in its hegemonic
form implies an attitude that promotes a monolithic view of culture, the
pluralistic literary streams in India can only be regarded as deviant forms
that do not take after the canonical literary tradition. They can only be
treated as ‘little’ traditions, most of which are expected to pay obeisance
to the great Indian tradition that is the repository of the dominant aes-
thetic. As this aesthetic insists on viewing literature as something that has
been sealed off from the everyday realities of the mundane world, one
might designate it the ‘hermetic aesthetic’. This is a literary ideology of
European origin connected with eighteenth-century western aesthetics
that came to India and other Third World cultures in the shape in which it
exists today through modernity and colonial mediation, though it is per-
tinent to remember that India found it easy to integrate the ideology into
its poetics because of the concept’s basically metaphysical character. It
was the metaphysical ambience of India’s non-secular and quasi-religious
literary institution that facilitated a quick assimilation of the idea of
literature’s autonomy as formulated by the European romantic theorists
at the dawn of modernity. Art’s autonomy has continued to be the cen-
tral principle of literary modernism that flourished in diverse Indian lan-
guages in the mid-twentieth century. Inasmuch as this concept addresses
the wider question of literature itself becoming dissociated from material
and historical practice, it coincides with the literary ideology of contem-
porary global culture as well.
There indeed is reason to believe that the development of the hermetic
aesthetic was but the natural culmination of the progress of the colonial
literary ideology that from the very beginning wanted the discourse of
imagination to be kept separate from the discourse of reason. One will
only have to look at the contents of some of the early literary publica-
tions that arose in Indian bhashas as a result of the colonial contact for a
corroboration of this observation. Look, for example, at the contents of
Vidyasamgraham (1864–1866), one of the early printed Malayalam peri-
odicals published under the supervision of Christian missionaries, the
harbingers of western modernity to Kerala.2 The most interesting point
about the articles published in this magazine is that it provides a decisive
clue to the kind of discourse that developed as a result of colonial mod-
ernity. It was a discourse of rationality—of instrumental reason—that,
as we see it today, has for long remained blind to certain basic aspects
of culture. All forms of knowledge in the era of modernity were articu-
lated within the limits of this discourse. These include knowledge forms
in the inchoate areas not only of science, aesthetics, and literature but
also of ethics, history, socio-political reform, administration, and jur-
isprudence. Even a casual perusal of the contents of the eight published
issues of Vidyasamgraham would indicate that, in spite of the journal’s
apparently multi-disciplinary thrust, almost all the articles included
in it argued ultimately for an amelioration of the material condition of
man. Modernity, in the end, and by implication, was defined in terms of
such an amelioration, for which modern education was presented as the
most potent and useful instrument. The title of Vidyasamgraham (liter-
ally, a compendium of learning) pointed specifically to this moral pur-
pose. So did almost all the articles printed, not only the essays on such
topics as the steam engine and the telegraph, whose overtly scientific
subject matter connected them directly with the advances of modern
technology, but also the essays on the subjects of religion and ethics
supposed to express a transcendental vision. This, in a sense, is part of
the general colonial tendency, shared alike by the scholars associated
2 This bilingual journal was published as a college magazine from C.M.S. College, an institu-
tion started by the Church Missionary Society at Kottayam as part of its educational reform pro-
ject in the nineteenth century. Eight issues of the journal were published from 1864 to 1866. The
issues of Vidyasamgraham were collected and reissued in 1993 by the Benjamin Bailey Research
Centre connected with the College in the form of a single volume.
with the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in the east and the Bombay Literary
Society in the west of India.
There is also an attempt to see modern science in terms of co-
lonial modernity’s missionary ethics. One of the essays on ethics
(‘Sanmargopadesam’ meaning ‘ethical instruction’) printed in the first
issue of the journal, for example, talks about the importance of produ-
cing authentic books about modern science in Malayalam. This attitude
has continued to be significant for all discourses connected with modern
knowledge in the era of colonialism. Even works of imaginative litera-
ture are cast in the discursive mould preset for pragmatic writing and
instrumental rationality. This is what one is to deduce from the novels
produced in Malayalam in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most
of them translations from western and Indian languages, all speaking the
moralizing idiom of evangelism. One might think especially of Catherine
Hannah Mullens’s Bengali novel, Phulmoni o Korunar Biboron (1852) and
Mrs. Collins’s English novel, The Slayer Slain (1859), both of which were
translated into Malayalam a few years after their initial publication, and
were in due course to take their places in the history of early Malayalam
fiction.
There is no point in looking for the protocols of the hermetic aesthetic
or of any variety of aesthetics in this environment, as the public culture
in India, in colonial modernity’s scheme of things, was not considered
sufficiently ‘mature’ to handle aesthetically significant material. This is
evident in the creative tension in Chandu Menon, the author of the novel
Indulekha (1889), who ventures into the business of novel writing after
trying unsuccessfully to translate into Malayalam some of his favourite
English novels. His purpose in a sense is to translate colonial modernity
into Malayalam in a context where he finds it difficult to disengage from
the matrix of interconnected ideas pertaining to modernity, such as edu-
cation, reform, ethics, and science. The matrix, prosaic in form and with
no twists and turns that mark the language of poetry, is integral to the
ideology of colonialism. One can translate this matrix with the same ease
that one may have in translating any of the essays on popular science
that regularly appeared in the pages of Vidyasamgraham and other mis-
sionary journals. Chandu Menon refers in the introduction to his novel
to the response of a learned friend who asserts that fiction is a luxury that
the Malayalam language would do well to disregard. ‘Books on science
are the need of the hour. Malayalam has no place for books on other
subjects at the moment’, the friend is on record as telling Menon (Chandu
Menon 2014: 9–10). The statement corresponds with the general tone of
colonial modernity which, in the Indian context, puts a premium on the
language of reason at the expense of the language of imagination. Most
Malayalam narratives published prior to Indulekha were merely attempts
at translating the ethics of colonial reason into the culture of the colon-
ized. Indulekha belonged to a different class of fiction. Though full of in-
ternal contradictions, one might consider this novel to embody Indian
modernity’s pioneering attempt to recapture the domain of imagination
and the aesthetic, long overshadowed by colonial modernity’s ethics of
reason.
To pursue the trajectory of the ethics of colonial reason further, one
might elaborate the unfolding scenario as a discursive formation, as an
organization of language that constitutes modes of knowledge within
the structures of inclusion and exclusion. Bernard S. Cohn, in a well-
known essay, argues for such a formation to have emerged in the nine-
teenth century in parts of India, which according to him, acted as ‘the
language of command’ and did the work of ‘converting Indian forms of
knowledge into European objects’ (1997: 21). Discourse in this formula-
tion is to be understood as a specific and somewhat inescapable way of
speaking about the world of social experience, which in India in the age
of colonial modernity is linked to the western enlightenment project ‘de-
voted to the cultivation and spread of modern sciences and arts among
Indians, if possible in the Indian languages’ (Chatterjee 1997: 15–16).
The primary objective of starting educational institutions in the nine-
teenth century under the aegis of colonial administration, whether
through the missionaries or through the reformists in India, was, as
Partha Chatterjee observes, the ‘nationalization of modern knowledges’
that would serve the interests of colonial modernity (1997: 16). In fact,
the motive behind the institution of C.M.S. College, the birthplace of
Vidyasamgraham, could not have been much different from the reason
given for the founding of Hindu College (renamed Presidency College
later) at Calcutta in the same period, and this involved, in the words of
S.C. Sengupta, a former Principal of the Hindu College, ‘the cultivation
of English literature and European science rather than Hindu theology
or metaphysics’ (quoted in Bagchi 1994: 150). The asymmetries between
Cohn’s views on the conversion of Indian forms of knowledge into colo-
nial objects and Chatterjee’s on the nationalization of western forms of
knowledge indeed are only apparent. Both speak essentially about the
process of knowledge formation, and the superficial difference between
them would dissolve the moment one remembers that discourse after all
is a way of organizing knowledge and experience within the structures
and processes of power.
The analysis carried out above indicates that though nineteenth-
century missionary discourse may appear to be different in flavour from
Cohn’s ‘language of command’ designed specifically to introduce young
British officials to the manners and customs of a subjected race, it cer-
tainly partook of the rational, scientific, and pragmatic qualities appro-
priate to the language of immediate reference in the colonial world. This
is yet another way in which the dialectic of modernity operated in Kerala.
Colonial modernity split the discursive practice into an emotionally sur-
charged private language and a rationally controlled public language,
and promoted the latter as the appropriate medium for all inter-personal
communication, including aesthetic communication.
The path that the discourse adopted to strengthen itself too partook of
this dialectic. The technology of printing that started making its impact
on the reading habits of the people of Kerala from the early nineteenth
century is an instance of this. Though printing helped in spreading lit-
eracy and the positive values of civility and sociality among the masses,
and led to a weakening of the aristocracy’s hold on knowledge re-
sources, printing’s inherent bias against textual pluralism can be seen to
have exerted some deleterious impact on the process of modernization.
Subsequent developments have also seen the technology of printing be-
coming crucial in the consolidation of the arbitrary and instrumentalist
dimensions of modernity. This arose not only from the specific, identifi-
able messages that printed prose communicated, whose ideational force
in a society in transition can hardly be underestimated, but also and
more importantly, from the ideological function that printing discharged
by setting up norms for writing and reading. Printing set precise limits
for the discourse and determined the shape of the knowledge in circu-
lation. By promoting assumptions about normal and deviant forms of
knowledge, it also helped society decide what was to be counted as true
knowledge.
Prior to the advent of printing, knowledge and literature circulated in
Kerala, as it did in other parts of the world, either orally among the masses
or through hand-copied palm-leaf or other kinds of manuscripts kept in
collections maintained often by kings and the aristocracy, to which only a
minority had access. In broad terms, one might say that both these forms
of knowledge transmission were accommodative of socio- historical
dynamics in that the oral and manuscript transmission of literary and
philosophical knowledge allowed for the limits of knowledge to be set
and re-set in each instance of oral performance or the copying by the
hand of manuscripts. Though it is possible to imagine a particularly mis-
chievous interpreter or copyist entering a wild interpolation into a newly
made text, it is more sensible to assume that interpolative changes are
normal, and are, in most cases, historically conditioned. Romila Thapar
says with reference to the various versions of the Śakuntalā story in its
travel across history that ‘when a theme changes in accordance with its
location at a historical moment, the change can illumine that moment,
and the moment in turn may account for the change’ (1995: vii). A.K.
Ramanujan states that a poet never tires of chiselling at his poem to make
it read better, but the history of its evolution comes to an end the moment
it gets into print. ‘By printing it you put a kind of moratorium on it’, says
Ramanujan (2001: 45). At an epistemological level, what printing did was
to introduce the notions of textual purity and authenticity into the do-
main of culture. These notions were quite unknown to premodern schol-
arship that paid little attention to the ‘true’ versions of texts—whether
they are proverbs, legends, songs, or tales—transmitted orally. These
were moves of standardization and authorization introduced into a so-
ciety that had no idea of such processes. The production of printed dic-
tionaries and books of grammar can be said to have further reinforced
these moves.
To come back to the evolution of fiction and its linkage with modernity,
it is obvious that Indulekha was born at the intersection of the discursive
and epistemological complexities sketched above. It was an extremely
complex novel that maintained a somewhat contradictory relationship
with the age that produced it. It partook of the scientific temper of the
Vidyasamgraham essays and the moralizing idiom of Mrs. Mullens’s
and Mrs. Collins’s translated novels. In this sense, it was a translation
of the mood and environment of rationality and scientific thinking that
colonial modernity sought to propagate. At the same time, it also consti-
tuted a suppression of this ethics in that it was the outcome of its author’s
conviction that aesthetics and imagination would not lend themselves
easily to translation. This is evident from some of the statements that the
author makes in the successive introductions to the first two editions of
the novel. Though Chandu Menon stops short in these introductions of
stating that the aesthetic was what got lost in translation, his experience
with the art of translating novels had allowed him to see that it was nei-
ther a useful nor a pleasurable exercise (Chandu Menon 2014: 8).
The fabrication of the hermetic aesthetic too is linked to this important
historical moment. As already suggested, the development of this aes-
thetic is to be regarded as the natural culmination of the progress of the
colonial literary ideology, which from the very beginning wanted the
discourse of imagination to be kept separate from modernity’s ethics of
reason. The history of literature in all Indian bhashas since the late nine-
teenth century has also been a history of the consolidation of this aes-
thetic that has made sure that modern literatures in bhashas, if they are
to be counted as ‘true’ forms of writing, would forever remain alienated
from the ambience of material and everyday culture. This seems to be
the unspoken message of the colonizer’s declared agenda on modernity
and reform. Given the reality that the colonizer undertook his civilizing
activities in the colonies with the help of literary works, the agenda to be
sure could not be extricated from the category of aesthetics. Here then is
a living proof of aesthetics presupposing a process whereby cultural pro-
duction gets de-linked from material and historical practices, and litera-
ture becomes independent of the various social functions that it served in
the past.
A brief review of another Indian novel set in Kerala, which is closer
in time to our own day, will reveal how the question of aesthetic mod-
ernity is managed by Indian writers in the age of advanced capitalism
and globalization. The novel is Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
(1997), which shot into fame after it won the prestigious Booker Prize
for literature in 1997. The novel comes as the natural culmination of the
progress of the hermetic aesthetic which, as already pointed out, system-
atically maintains the division between the discourse of imagination and
the ethics of reason. Literary history has, by this time, learnt to reconcile
itself with the rise and fall of the literary movement or the assemblage of
movements called ‘modernism’, which can be described as representing a
general peaking of the sensibility connected with modernity, but in more
specific terms constitutes an intensification of the formal and aesthetic
properties of the artwork. The hermetic aesthetic idea of an autonomous
art that is fully governed by its own internal rules finds perfect fruition in
modernism. Though critics and theorists of modernism are inclined gen-
erally to focus on the concept’s narrowly ‘literary’ dimensions, its broader
and more serious ideological connections with the age of modernity, cap-
italism, and even, perhaps, a globalized capital are elaborated by critics
like Neil Larsen (1990). Characterizing modernism as the manifestation
of the general crisis in capitalism that shows up as a crisis in representa-
tion, Larsen says:
Modernism stems from this crisis [ . . . ] and inverts it. The crisis in rep-
resentation becomes a crisis of representation: representation no longer
‘works’, no longer appears to offer the subject any cognitive access to the
object. (1990: xxiv)
The God of Small Things is a classic example of such a crisis in repre-

sentation belatedly manifesting in an Indian modernist work. What the
novel creates is a fantasy world built on the patchwork of recollections
and childhood memories pertaining to the lives of the seven-year-old fra-
ternal twins, Estha and Rahel, who, though they are not the narrators in
the strict sense, offer important points of view for narration. Other stories
told in the novel, of the family history of Ammu and Chacko, of Chacko’s
life as a Rhodes scholar in England, of Baby Kochamma’s infatuation for
Father Mulligan, of Ammu’s marriage and her life in Calcutta, of her af-
fair with Velutha, and of Velutha’s torture by the police—all emerge from
this narrative context, which is somewhat ‘inauthentic’ inasmuch as it is
recounted by the omniscient narrator, borrowing the perspective, partly,
of Rahel and partly, perhaps, of Estha, the latter presented as becoming
mute at some point in his life. There is thus a crisis and a breakdown in
representation at the thematic level, replicated in the very formal struc-
ture of the novel. The crisis becomes deeper in the representation of the
political co-text interwoven into the text, again because of the problem
noted by Larsen—representation does not offer the subject ‘any cognitive
access to the object’. This in fact is a problem endemic to the hermetic
aesthetic itself. The world of fantasy and the world of reality are separate
spheres of experience for this aesthetic. The crisis that this fact can create
for representation is evidenced by the way in which The God of Small
Things handles the relation between history and fiction. Although the
novel is sometimes read as a work that deals authentically with Kerala’s
history of the past century, with frequent references made to its creative
articulations of untouchability, the caste system, and the emptiness of
the society’s communist rhetoric, the novel’s perceptions on these issues
are superficial and somewhat distorted, as evidenced by its caricature of
one of the most respected of Kerala’s political leaders of the last century,
E.M.S. Namboodiripad.
One of the novel’s perennial beauties, however, is its superb craftsman-
ship, which to some extent has helped the novel mask its inadequacies
at the epistemological level. Yet the crisis in representation remains, and
this is indicated by the author’s initial note on a preliminary page where
she feels compelled to remind the reader: ‘This is a work of fiction. The
characters in it are all fictional’. The note is significant in that it extends
the benefit of fictionality to all other depictions in the novel, including the
representation of reality and history. One might extend this benefit to the
depictions of communism and the caste question. The novel’s apparent
setting in history, the detailed description it gives of places in Kerala, re-
peated references to the Indian Communist movement, and recurrence
of the word ‘history’ in the pages of the novel—all these point towards
an attempted subversion of the hermetic aesthetic, though what all that
yields in reality is a reaffirmation and consolidation of the aesthetic. The
novel only wants to create the illusion that it has successfully broken
down the distinction between fact and fiction without actually doing so.
For to do so would mean breaching the hermetic aesthetic, which in ef-
fect would undermine the work’s privileged status as a highly valued spe-
cimen of imaginative writing.
The change that happens to the Indian literary culture as it moves from
Indulekha to The God of Small Things is indeed interesting. But what is
more interesting is the continued operation of the aesthetics of colonial
modernity in Indian bhasha literature that this exemplifies. There is no
gainsaying the ‘literary’ merit of Arundhati Roy’s novel, however much,
we might critically analyse the notion of literary value. For the European
literary market, however, India is still, even in the twenty-first century, an
attractive commodity, and this is indicated by the hefty prepublication
advances that The God of Small Things received from international pub-
lishers and the severe competition that was on show before its prepubli-
cation rights were sold in several European countries. Larsen’s argument
regarding the crisis in representation and its link with the modernization
of capital—and today, perhaps with the globalization of capital—makes
perfect sense here. Literature, as Raymond Williams says, is never seen
as an abstract concept, but ‘there is a virtually immediate and unnoticed
transfer of the specific values of particular works and kinds of work to
what operates as a concept’ (Williams 1977: 45). Such an abstraction al-
lows the literary text to overflow its boundaries and produce the concept
of the aesthetic, which suits the tyrannical purposes of colonial mod-
ernity. What is needed, however, is a concept of literature that will also
account for the presence in the literary system of the elements of the pol-
itical, which precisely is what the theory of an alternative Indian mod-
ernity would posit before the reader.
2
The Everyday as Modernity
Although Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (3 volumes: 1947;

1961; 1981) constitutes the fundamental analysis of the concept of the
everyday in contemporary social theory, it is in his essay ‘Towards a
Leftist Cultural Politics’ (1988) that one would come across the most con-
cise statement on the meaning and significance of the term. Mentioning
‘everyday’ as a term that he has been responsible for contributing to the
progressively evolving vocabulary of Marxism, Lefebvre attempts in this
short essay to provide a fairly comprehensive summation of what the
term signifies for cultural theory:
What is the everyday? In appearance, it is the insignificant and the

banal. It is what Hegel called ‘the prose of the world’, nothing more
modest. Before Marx, labour was considered unworthy of study, as be-
fore psychoanalysis and Freud, sex was considered unworthy of study.
I think the same can be said of the everyday. As Hegel said, what is the
most familiar is not for all that the best known. (1988: 78)
Lefebvre does not mention in this passage the everyday’s concurrence

with modernity, though in a note given at the end of the text, while dis-
tinguishing the everyday from daily life, he makes a brief allusion to
modernity. Daily life, he says, is routine existence permeated with values
and myths, while the everyday indicates the integration of daily life into
modernity, programmed by ‘marketing and advertisements’ (1988: 87).
Lefebvre, it may be remembered, is also an important theorist of mod-
ernity as well, on which he has published an extended essay under the title
Introduction to Modernity (1962). The Critique and his other works on the
everyday too are replete with references to modernity. Many of the qual-
ities that one would identify with the everyday, such as its status as the
social practice of the middle classes and the aspiration of the poor as well
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871558.003.0003
as its implication in the capitalist mode of production, indeed are aspects
of the modern world. In The Everyday Life in the Modern World (1971),
Lefebvre specifically states, somewhat poetically, that ‘everyday life is a
crust of the earth over the tunnels and caves of the unconscious against a
skyline of uncertainty and illusion that we call modernity’ (1971: i).
The word ‘everyday’, however, does not reflect the true sense of its
French original, la quotidienne, which carries suggestions of drabness
and repetition connected with day-to-day life. The quotidian in a sense
is what is excluded from consideration by philosophy, and it is this exclu-
sion that marks the everyday’s connection with elite responses and forms
of thought, including art and literature of the esoteric kind. This is what
makes modernity’s relation with high art and elite literature a matter of
concern in considerations of the everyday. Also, while the everyday rep-
resents the quotidian at the temporal level, it can also become spatialized
in artworks to include the minor and the marginalized. Art and literature
in the past revelled in epic and philosophical themes expressed in a grand,
secure, and self-assured language, but the advent of modernity seemed to
pose severe threats to this security and self-assurance. ‘The world’s be-
coming philosophical is at the same time philosophy’s becoming worldly’,
as Marx said in a statement appearing in his doctoral dissertation which
Lefebvre was in the habit of citing quite frequently (Elden 2008: 81). The
statement could with equal relevance be extended and paraphrased to
comment on the bond between literature and the world in the new cli-
mate. But elite literature would never brook a situation where art or lit-
erature could be deemed worldly. This indeed is the point in talking about
the connection between modernity and the everyday in the context of the
hermetic aesthetic.
There is reason to believe that Lefebvre was sensitive to the schism
in colonial modernity to which references were made in the previous
chapter. The schism, it was noted, was between the global and national,
the national and the regional, the abstract and the concrete, the structured
and the experienced. Speaking of Marx, Lefebvre suggests that the schism
in modernity was important for Marx too, who conceived of modernity,
especially in its manifestation as state power, as ‘a separation within
praxis’ (Lefebvre 1995: 170). Modernity simultaneously designated a
form of the state, as distinguished from general social processes, as well
as the state’s uneasy relation with everyday social practice. ‘Everywhere,
The Everyday as Modernity 31
in every area, the irrational and the rational become separated and yet
confused, the one hiding the other in a single contradictory reality which
is a rational (social and political) unity in appearance only: generalized
unreality’ (1995: 170). Marx’s ‘irrational’ here obviously is the domain of
the subjective and the experienced, which indeed is the territory of the
everyday. While Marx thought that this domain of ‘unreality’ could be
reconciled with the concerns of the public world through revolutionary
social praxis, modernity sought to resolve the problem at the level of art
theory by instituting the esoteric discipline of aesthetics that took care of
the subjective domain, which ironically was the territory of the eternal
and the universal. Given the reality that the ideology enveloping aes-
thetics insisted on viewing literature as something that was sealed off
from the external world, what the culture of aesthetics promoted was an
esoteric worldview that excluded the everyday from its purview.
The problem with modernity, then, is part of its dialectic, which is
that it engenders the category of the everyday as an inevitable aspect of
modernity even as it devises ways of exorcizing the everyday from its ex-
perience. The internal schism in the concept noted earlier is a direct con-
sequence of this dialectic. The dialectic also leads to a series of splits in
the experience of modernity as, for example, the rift between the private
and the public, between the mundane and the transcendental, between
the political and the aesthetic, between the rational and the imaginary,
and even between prose and verse that mark the literary discourse of the
modern period. The split shows itself in Wordsworth, one of the early
practitioners of western modernity and an advocate of the language of
the everyday in nineteenth-century Britain, who nevertheless nurtured
ideas of creativity that emerged straight from the soul of the hermetic
aesthetic. The conception of an abstract Art (with a capital A) was the
direct outcome of eighteenth-century aesthetics that swore by a be-
lief in the creative imagination alienated from material practice. ‘High
is our calling, Friend!—Creative Art’, so says the poet of the everyday in
an 1815 sonnet (‘To B.R. Haydon’) addressed to the painter, Benjamin
Robert Haydon, who was later to repay the compliment by painting a
portrait of Wordsworth standing on top of Helvellyn in the Lake District,
his head held high among the moving clouds. For the European literary
tradition, Haydon’s portrait of Wordsworth, on which Elizabeth Barrett
Browning published a poem in 1842 (‘Sonnet on Mr. Haydon’s Portrait
of Mr. Wordsworth’), has been crucial in canonizing the iconic figure of
the romantic artist, exiled and other-worldly, musing among the celestial
clouds. That Wordsworth sees no contradiction between aspects of the
everyday celebrated in his poems and the transcendent spirituality that
he associates with nature is to be interpreted from this general perspec-
tive on modernity.
This can be proved with greater force with reference to the positions
of Charles Baudelaire, Wordsworth’s younger contemporary from France
and a precursor of nineteenth-century French symbolism who was also
a fervent advocate of the theory of art’s autonomy. Though Baudelaire’s
youthful years were marked by an enthusiasm for radical politics, his
poetic persona seems to have been formed largely by a fundamentally
romantic world vision and an esoteric aesthetic. His fascination with
the idea of the newly formulated concept of imagination as the force be-
hind art is expressed in his admiration for two major nineteenth-century
writers, Thomas de Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe, both of whom looked
upon imagination as autonomous and self-referential, in spite of the fa-
miliarity that both had with everyday life in the streets of the modern
cities they inhabited. Baudelaire’s forays into experiments relating to
artistic creativity, prompted by de Quincey’s work on drug-induced im-
agination, have been critically reviewed by a number of scholars (see,
e.g., Burt 2005). Art for Baudelaire was an end in itself, and it was this
attitude that forced him to remark: ‘Death or deposition would be the
penalty if poetry were to become assimilated to science or morality; the
object of poetry is not Truth, the object of poetry is Poetry itself ’ (quoted in
Hamburger 1969: 4).
Baudelaire is also a theorist of modernity, a fact that has been taken
note of by Lefebvre too. Describing Baudelaire’s 1859–1860 essay, ‘The
Painter of Modern Life’, as a milestone in the history of modernity studies,
Lefebvre states that what Baudelaire achieves by linking the modern
with the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent is to draw attention to
modernity’s temporal dimension as well as its self-identity with fashion.
‘Reversing the perspective, and making the eternal his starting point ra-
ther than his goal, Baudelaire defines beauty as something to be captured
in the fleeting instant’, he says (Lefebvre 1995: 171). As for modernity’s
implication in the everyday, Lefebvre suggests that apart from reinter-
preting modernity as an idea connected with the ephemeral rather than
the eternal, Baudelaire provides a further ‘everyday’ twist to the idea
of fashion by feminizing it. Though Lefebvre’s (and Baudelaire’s) pri-
mary reason for making such a remark is the etymological connection
between the French words for ‘modernity’ and ‘fashion’, both of which
are derived from the Latin root word ‘modus’ (Lehmann 2000: xv), the
reference to feminization (as in ‘a la mode’) also calls attention to the
‘everyday’ and non-hegemonic dimension of Baudelaire’s characters, es-
pecially women characters, drawn as most of them are from the margins
of French society.
Linked intimately to this question of the everyday as it gets transacted
in European poetry is the problem of realism, which refers to the specific
style of literary representation, especially in fiction, that presupposes a
close correspondence between the artwork and the object represented.
The nineteenth-century novels of Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Charles
Dickens, and others were presented as specimens of European fictional
realism because of the honest attempts that they made towards depicting
the everyday with a sense of verisimilitude. Though this kind of realism—
often described as classical realism—is an extension of modernity in that
it is modernity’s presupposition of a well-defined object of perception
as distinguished from the perceiving subject that manifests here, its as-
sumptions have come under attack from artistic modernism, which, ac-
cording to Lefebvre, is to be understood as modernity’s ‘consciousness’ of
itself (1995: 1). Realism has subsequently been theorized in a number of
other ways too, most of which start from the basic position that all forms
of realism emanate from distinct conventions of reading, many of which
go against the principles of classical realism. Several avant-garde writers
of the twentieth century such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and
Bertolt Brecht are united in denouncing the critical tendency to define
realism in naïve and mechanical terms (e.g., see the essays in R. Taylor
1977). Brecht’s name is particularly significant in this context because
of the way in which he integrated issues of the everyday into his drama,
which also forged a formal pattern that clearly excluded the traits and
conventions of classical realism.
The relation between realism and the everyday becomes more compli-
cated in visual culture, which promotes an apparently direct and unme-
diated representation of the object of perception. Though the mediations
involved in visual representation have been subjected to close critical
analysis in recent days by film theorists, it is a fact of cultural history that
the advent of cinema in the twentieth century has radically altered the lit-
erary scholar’s attitude to the everyday. The graphic sense of truthfulness
that the filmmaker can create in depictions of reality—the scene of the
train tearing across the screen in Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery
(1903), is said to have forced early movie viewers to flee in terror from the
theatre in the days of silent cinema—is unthinkable for a literary artist.
Contemporary society is a society of ceremony and spectacle, a society
that turns the signs of the everyday into icons that are to be visually con-
sumed. This was what Lefebvre meant when he referred to the change
from daily life to the everyday, which, as he indicated, was programmed
by the spectacle of glitzy advertisements. Modernity’s ideology radically
transforms the ambience of the everyday world. John Berger draws atten-
tion to an important aspect of this transformation while reviewing the
historical shift from Titian’s nude paintings of the premodern period to
Edouard Manet’s modern paintings of nude women, as exemplified by the
former’s Venus of Urbino (1538) and the latter’s response to it in Olympia
(1863). Both painters represent women’s nudity, but while Titian’s de-
sexualized and self-engrossed women appear to be representations of
idealistic, dehistoricized, and ungendered female objects, Manet’s bold
women looking somewhat ‘defiantly’ at the spectator can be regarded as
specimens of gendered women who recognize themselves as subjects of
history (Berger 1972: 63). Berger here is talking about the incorporation
of the everyday into the process of subject formation, a development that
can be interpreted as deepening the split in art experience.
While one cannot in the present-day world think of eliminating the
icons of the everyday from one’s experience of art and literature, the con-
ventions of reading would persuade one to erase the everyday and mis-
read its signs as the signals of eternity and assign to them perennial and
universal significance. This, as we noted earlier, is what aesthetics as an
esoteric discourse endeavours to achieve. The hermetic aesthetic is a his-
torically specific instance of this practice, and is linked to the literary
ideology of European origin that came to India and other Third World
cultures in the shape in which it exists today through colonial medi-
ation. Since the ideology’s metaphysical character agreed with the non-
historical ambience of India’s hegemonic literary culture, it must have
been easy for the hermetic aesthetic to be quietly assimilated into Indian
bhashas. Art’s autonomy that denies the everyday has continued to be the
central principle of aesthetics in the entire period of modernity. Its dom-
inance in literary modernism that flourished in diverse Indian bhashas
in the mid-twentieth century is a telling illustration of this. This is also
true of the literary ideology of contemporary global culture, whose idea
of representation implies the literary imagination’s dissociation from
society’s material practice.
Since the concept of literature in all cultures works in tandem with
the hermetic aesthetic and has the innate tendency to absolutize and
hegemonize literary experience, mainstream literatures seldom en-
deavour to integrate ideas connected with the everyday into the general
literary culture. That is why all literary traditions, ‘national’ and ‘regional’,
‘great’ and ‘little’, ‘marga’ and ‘desi’ alike in the Indian context, howso-
ever humble their origins might be, end up claiming for themselves the
elevated status of aestheticism. There indeed might be moments in the
history of modern Indian literature when the writer tries to steer clear
of elitism and makes conscious efforts to adopt radical postures associ-
ated with the literature of the everyday. The emergence of the progressive
literary movement in Indian literatures is one such moment. This pan-
Indian trend flourished in most Indian languages in pre-Independence
days and had some of the very prominent Indian writers like Munshi
Premchand, Sadat Hassan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Vijaydan Detha,
Habib Tanvir, Amrita Pritam, and Mulk Raj Anand subscribing to its
ideals. Early associates of the movement in Malayalam included Kesari
Balakrishna Pillai, M.P. Paul, and Joseph Mundasseri, who were among
the best Indian intellectuals of the time, as well as a number of fiction
writers such as Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai,
Kesava Dev, Ponkunnam Varkey, and S.K. Pottekkat. The consistent way
in which these writers sought to articulate the concerns of the everyday is
what strikes a reader considering their works in the context of modernity.
To look at one of these writers in some detail, the Jnanpith-winning fic-
tion writer S.K. Pottekkat provides a clear model of a Third-World artist
whose work is complicated by the contradictory presence of some of the
elements of modernity noted above—a romantic worldview, an affinity
to realism, and a concern for the everyday coupled with an espousal of
the hermetic aesthetic. Pottekkat was primarily a writer of novels, short
stories, and travel literature. The voice of the romantic artist is very strong
in his early writings, and it was perhaps as a romantic writer that he
constructed his own self-image. There is a reference in one of his trav-
elogues, London Notebook (1970), to a meeting he had in London with
High Commissioner V.K. Krishna Menon, to whom he introduces him-
self as a writer of romantic fiction (Pottekkat 2001: 28). If this self-image
is an indication of his acquiescence in the ideology of modernity, his
standing also as a writer of travel literature only confirms this acquies-
cence. Writing for all modern artists is after all an act of travel that brings
the writer into contact with new sights, new sounds, and new experi-
ences. Travel for Pottekkat acted as a true emblem of modernity which
drew him closer to unknown forms and contexts of reality. He sought to
document this reality truthfully with a sense of realism, and in that sense
could be regarded as one of the earliest Malayalam writers to internalize
the drabness of modernity and the everyday into his practice of writing.
However, one could also discern in Pottekkat the problem connected
with modernity’s dialectic, which is that even as it engenders the category
of everyday, modernity also devises ways of expelling the everyday from
experience.
Pottekkat’s posthumous fame has rested primarily on his master-
piece Oru Desattinte Katha (The Story of a Land, 1971), the novel that
fetched for him the Sahitya Akademi award. He has altogether published
10 novels and around 170 short stories, each regarded as an epitome of
storytelling conceived as a social ritual rather than an individual achieve-
ment. Oru Desattinte Katha in a sense represents the peak of a narrative
journey that progresses from the romanticism of his early stories to the
narrative realism of his mature work. Pottekkat is an artist who, even as
he subscribes consciously to the hermetic aesthetic, invalidates that aes-
thetic in practice by facilitating a textual work that is non-esoteric in in-
tent. This contradiction is dramatized in his evolution as a writer. While
his early novels such as Vishakanyaka (The Fatal Woman, 1948) are char-
acterized by a supporting aesthetic that presents the story as an artifact
rather than as an extended narrative practice, the later ones, especially
Oru Theruvinte Katha (A Street’s Story, 1960) and Oru Desattinte Katha,
are concerned more with narrating stories that are embroiled in ques-
tions pertaining to the history of a community. One might take this to
be a corroboration of the idea of Walter Benjamin who would describe
storytelling as an act comparable to a folk ritual that initiates a pedagogic
practice involving the construction of the collective memory of a people.
‘The storyteller takes what he tells from experience—his own or that re-
ported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are
listening to it’ (1973: 87). This, needless to say, is a communal exercise. In
contrast to this is the generally individual-oriented tradition of reading
that merely endeavours to communicate isolated personal experiences
through novels-as-artifacts. The textual practice that Pottekkat inspires
through his later novels corresponds to Benjamin’s storytelling in that
it brings into being a community of readers who would actively body
forth, in the process of its reading, a collective subject and a collective
history.
What the later novels of Pottekkat unconsciously recognize, in other
words, is the discursive singularity of the novel as a narrative form that
responds to the historical specificities of modernity. As already noted, it
is in Oru Desattinte Katha that Pottekkat has most successfully worked
his anxieties about modernity into the form of narration. But Kabeena,
his last published novel, can be treated as an example of a narrative that
lays bare the diverse ways in which the formal aspects of narration get
dovetailed into the practice of writing. This short novel set in Tanganyika
in East Africa tells the story of Kumar, a young man from Malabar who
is appointed as a police inspector in Tanzania. Kumar marries an African
girl named Sara in Tanganyika. They soon have a daughter whom they
name Kabeena. Before her marriage, Sara used to be associated with
an African ethnic terror group that practiced black magic to eliminate
the country’s white invaders. But after her marriage, she becomes a fol-
lower of the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi and establishes a home for the
downtrodden. But things turn bad for Sara and Kabeena when Kumar
is killed by a member of the terror group. The novel closes at the point
where Kabeena comes of age and arrives in Kerala. Though this simple
plot does not indicate any innovation in the technique of writing, it is
the peculiar way in which the novelist chooses to narrate the story that
makes Kabeena a unique reading experience. Considered rhetorically,
the novel’s narrative could be regarded as a composite discourse pro-
duced by each of its narrators who appear in its four chapters. No attempt
is made to grant ‘aesthetic’ coherence to the form of the novel by unifying
the disparately organized narration by three different narrators. Kumar’s,
the young Sara’s, the widowed Sara’s, and Kabeena’s stories are narrated
from separate standpoints which, though interrelated, also announce the
possibility of narrative polyphony that is implicit in the novel form.
While this narrative aspect is in full play in the form of Oru Desattinte
Katha, which on that account can be read as an engaging example of a
Bakhtinian dialogical novel, what makes the novel more engaging is its en-
tanglement with questions of the everyday. This new focus, which comes
apparently as a consequence of Pottekkat’s disenchantment with the ro-
mantic worldview, turns Oru Desattinte Katha into an important docu-
ment connected with the development of modernity in Kerala. Though
the elaboration of a romantic vision is an integral aspect of the ideology
of modernity, a debunking of the romantic as it appears at that point in
time in Malayalam literary modernism, does not constitute a basic de-
parture from modernity. Though Pottekkat was not favourably disposed
to the formal experiments connected with the literary modernism of the
1960s, he could not have been unresponsive to the increasing obsoles-
cence of the romantic worldview that his early novels up to and including
Vishakanyaka embodied. In a 1979 interview, Pottekkat acknowledges his
difficulty with the language of fictional modernism, but recognizes at the
same time that times have changed. ‘Changes can be seen in ideas, phil-
osophies and ways of expression’, he says. ‘There is a total change in forms
and themes. Fiction is now infected by the new energy transmitted by
science and technology, by politics and journalism’ (Pottekkat 2013: 66).
It is this recognition of all-round change that is illustrated by Pottekkat’s
turn to the everyday in his novels of the period following the 1960s, es-
pecially in Oru Desattinte Katha. Pottekkat’s creative personality was al-
ways predisposed to the drab, the banal, and the routine. Truthfulness
to day-to-day experiences was an important aspect of his creative prac-
tice. He was in the habit of keeping a writer’s notebook in which he re-
corded his impressions of the quotidian world and the experiences he
acquired in his interaction with men and matters. It is awareness of this
altered relation between literature and the world whose depths Pottekkat
could not plumb even during the days he aligned with pre-Independence
progressive literature that makes for the discursive distinction of Oru
Desattinte Katha.
Oru Desattinte Katha is an autobiographical novel, which is another
way of saying that what the novel does is to explore certain unknown
segments of the writer’s self, which in Pottekkat’s case is co-extensive
with the self of his native land. The writer himself perhaps is unaware of
the existence of such a self or its contiguity with the land. Fiction in the
modern era after all is a means of making explorations into landscapes,
both of the mind and the world. This has been emphasized by Milan
Kundera who says that the only ethical reason for a novel’s existence is
to discover areas of the mind and the world that may be unknown to the
person—‘a hitherto unknown segment of existence’ (Kundera 1988: 5).
As for Oru Desattinte Katha, its plot is redolent with the smell of count-
less unknown segments, which however do not add up to the image of a
well-plotted ‘desam’ (a country unit) indicated in the title. It is a deeply
fragmented world of experience that appears in the novel. The ‘desam’
here is Atiranippadam, a thinly veiled fictionalization of the part of
Calicut where Pottekkat was born and where he lived for the most part
of his life. The inhabitants of Atiranippadam are mostly people drawn
from the working classes—vendors, masons, carpenters, toddy tappers,
tea-shop owners, and saw-mill workers. The quotidian events happening
in Atiranippadam are narrated from the perspectives of the little men and
women inhabiting the suburban countryside. Though there is the cen-
tral consciousness of Sreedharan acting as a connecting link between the
several stories narrated, the basic narrative structure of the novel is that
of a collage in which a number of independent scenes and sketches are
brought together in order to produce a composite effect. Pottekkat’s docu-
mentary mode of narration in Oru Desattinte Katha can be said to antici-
pate the more popular forms of metafictional narration that a number of
Malayalam writers were to adopt and elaborate in the decades to follow.
The preoccupation with the everyday in Oru Desattinte Katha mani-
fests not merely in its representation of the drab and the commonplace,
but in its journal form that constitutes a replication of the shape of the
travel diary that Pottekkat had perfected into an art in some of his writ-
ings. A review of any of the 65 chapters—this is apart from the novel’s
prologue and its lengthy epilogue titled ‘Marmarangal’ (Rustlings)—
forming the three-part novel will prove this. True, it is a lucid picture
of the everyday in the modern world that Pottekkat sketches in Oru
Desattinte Katha. However, it is also true that Pottekkat has not been able
to break free from some of the structures of modernity that bind his his-
torical subjectivity together. The novel’s conspicuous patriarchal bias is
an evidence of this. Though Pottekkat’s narrative style has succeeded in
capturing certain hitherto undiscovered segments of his everyday self,
the hermetic aesthetic that has taken possession of his artistic personality
has made sure that the creative subject stays clear of the everyday and
transcends itself into the domain of the eternal and the universal through
the captivating brilliance of the aesthetic imagination.
3
Print Capitalism and Modernity
Much work has been done on the relationship between modernity and
the evolution of prose as a medium of literary communication in Indian
bhashas.1 A critical review of the studies undertaken on this question
(see, e.g., Blackburn and Dalmia 2004) would reveal that the word
‘prose’ in this period functions as a key to the modern worldview, indeed
to the very process of modernity as it evolved in most bhashas from the
closing years of the eighteenth century. Although what the modernity
discourses unravel is the history of how the western world engaged it-
self with non-western cultures as part of colonial expansion, it might
appear ironic that these discourses also embody elements that would,
to some extent, empower the colonized and make them capable of re-
sisting colonialism, sometimes overtly, but mostly in covert ways. It is
for this reason that a reductive model representing a naively conceived
interaction between tradition and modernity proves inadequate in ex-
plaining the complexities of the cultural history of nineteenth-century
India. There are several issues to be sorted out here, such as, for example,
the new educational and social reforms which colonialism brought into
being in Asian and African societies as part of modernity-related re-
form. When it comes to the question of the bhasha context, one should
also take into account India’s indigenous culture that manifests in di-
verse and multifarious forms at the regional level. There is also a con-
flict of interest between the colonizer country on the one hand and the
colonized societies built on inherited forms of hierarchical power and
organized around caste-based social groupings on the other to reckon
with. One may find it difficult to analyse the real nature of colonial mod-
ernity without reference to the debates that developed around these and
1 This chapter is built upon the arguments regarding modernity and the evolution of prose
I originally made in an essay on the subject in my book in Malayalam, Etirezhuttukal (Counter-

writings, 2013b). I am thankful to Fathima E.V. who prepared a draft English translation of the
essay to work on.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192871558.003.0004
several other issues. Some of the issues thus debated were described as
both modernity’s causes and, simultaneously, its effects. The spread of
English education, the arrival of print, the growth of printed periodicals,
the missionary involvement in language activities, Bible translation
projects, the emergence of new narrative forms like social history, and
the novel are among such issues. However, the social meaning and rele-
vance of these developments will become clear only if they are studied
in the context of indigenous and native traditions, placing them at the
originary site from where popular reformist impulses and resistance
practices emerged. In other words, discussions about modernity will
cease to be Euro-centric only when the heterogeneity of India’s cultural
practices expressed in and through bhashas are incorporated into—and
set off against—the idea of modernity.
If prose in the modern period can be regarded as a discursive forma-
tion, as the ‘language of command’ that represents the potential of cul-
tural practices in their entirety (Cohn 1997: 21), the prose revolution in
Malayalam and other Indian bhashas that occurred in the nineteenth
century can be said to embody the complex and conflicting dimensions
of this formation. The development of prose certainly can be inter-
preted as a process that clearly marks the passage from the traditional to
the modern. In consonance with the etymological difference between
the words ‘verse’ and ‘prose’, the shift from verse to prose announces the
transition from a convoluted and somewhat opaque state of affairs to-
wards a new social order, one that is relatively simple, straightforward,
and transparent. This to be sure is a desirable outcome of the prose
revolution that occurred in the nineteenth century. Alternatively, a ra-
ther undesirable fall-out can also be said to have accompanied this posi-
tive shift. This pertains to the relative undervaluing of the inscrutable
language of creativity in a world dominated by the relatively uncom-
plicated logic of prose. One might wonder whether the logic of linear
thinking underwriting the evolution of prose was conducive to the pro-
tection and promotion of creativity and the faculty of emotional com-
munication inherent in native cultures. The currently widespread belief
that western modernity only popularized a discursive order rooted in
rationality and a prosaic logic with no regard whatsoever for the cre-
ative and emotional make-up of the colonized subject is the provoca-
tion behind this question.
Print Capitalism and Modernity 43
These in a sense are two separate approaches that current literary schol-
arship has taken on the evolution of prose in bhashas. They are recipro-
cally linked positions, aspects of which have already been subjected to a
preliminary examination in the previous chapters. To focus on the first
position, the transformation from verse to prose can be seen as the sign
of a social revolution that gives birth to a new social order. Though it may
not be semantically precise to use the word ‘verse’ in the sense of ‘poetry’,
poetic literature certainly formed the heart and soul of the Indian, and
especially Malayalam, literary heritage of the premodern period. This is
true right from the days of Ramacharitam, the twelfth-century bhasha
rendering of sections from the Ramayana, narrated in an environment
that was, in a couple of centuries, to develop into the cult of bhakti in
Malayalam. The momentous role of the medieval bhakti movement in
engendering new awakenings in the poetic traditions of Indian bhashas
has been pointed out by literary historians (see, e.g., some of the essays in
Lele 1981; Sisir Kumar Das 2005: 27–51). Medieval bhakti was respon-
sible for robust social renaissances in languages like Tamil, Kannada, and
Marathi. Though the bhakti tradition did not perhaps operate with the
same force in Malayalam as it did in these other bhashas, the influence
of the devotional poetry of Cherusseri and Ezhuthachan on the subse-
quent trajectory of literature was tremendous. Literary histories would,
in spite of this, testify to the fact that after the vigorous growth of poetry
in the medieval times, the Malayalam poetic tradition suffered a series
of setbacks in the early modern period, that is to say, in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. One might inquire in this context as to
why literary histories in general speak of the premodern period as an era
marked by the poetic genres alone. Why is it that the premodern literary
endeavours are reduced by and large into poetic practices, as documented
by the first literary history of Malayalam, Malayala Bhasha Charitham
(History of the Malayalam Language, 1881)? In the Preface to this book,
written by P. Govinda Pillai, the author clarifies on the purpose of his his-
tory thus: ‘The aim of this book is to discover the poetic luminaries who
adorn the firmament of Malayalam letters at present and to identify the
faults of this language so as to rectify them from future practice, as well
as to resurrect past poems sunk in the ocean of forgetfulness. Its other
purposes are to prevent contemporary poetry from drifting into oblivion
and to promote the creation of new poems’ (Govinda Pillai 2017: 45;
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
prayers once more, and went to bed. I was restless the first
of the night, but toward morning I fell asleep and had a
most sweet dream. Methought I stood at the gate of a most
lovely and well-ordered garden, full of flowers, surpassing
all I had ever seen for beauty and sweetness, and bathed in
a light such as I never saw in this world of ours. Therein I
could see many spirits, walking, talking and singing, clothed
all in white, some of them with crowns of radiant stars. I
looked eagerly for some one I knew, and saw Sister Bridget
among the brightest, and then Amice; but they did not see
me nor could I attract their notice. At last my mother came
toward me, dressed and crowned like the rest, with her
hands filled with roses. Her face was like herself, but more
full of peace than I had ever seen it in this life, when it ever
wore a shade of care.
"Dear mother," said I, "will you tell me what I shall do?"
"Honor thy father and thy mother!" said she, in her old
voice of gentle command.
"But, mother, you did give me to the cloister!" I said,

trembling, I knew not why.
"I gave you to God!" said she, and smiled upon me.
"And is not this the same?" I asked.
Her answer was, "They have made the word of God of none
effect, through their tradition."
"Can I not come in to you, dearest mother?" I asked,

feeling an inexpressible longing to enter that fair Paradise.
"Not yet. Thy place is prepared, but thou hast yet much
work to do. See here are roses for thy bridal crown. Go
home to thy house and wait thy Lord's time."
She held out the flowers to me, as she spoke; a most
wonderful sweetness filled the air, and seemed to steal into
my very soul, bringing I know not what of calm and
quietness. Then I awoke, and behold, it was but a dream;
yet was it wonderful clear and real to me, and I seem as if I
had indeed seen my mother.
I had gone to sleep all tossed and undecided; but lying

awake in the clear early dawn, all seemed to be made plain
to me. How could I return to the convent, where half our
duties consisted in prayers offered to the saints and our
Lady—in dressing up images and the like? What should I do
there? Either I must live a life wholly false and hypocritical,
or I must expose myself to I know not what, of persecution,
and perhaps a fearful death. And here came to my mind the
niches I had seen, bricked up in the chapel vault, and the
nameless neglected graves in that corner, I can't think it is
our Lord's will that we should seek the crown of martyrdom,
though many I know have done so; for He expressly bade
his disciples, when they were persecuted in one city, to flee
to another. No, I can never go back! My mind is made up,
and I have told my father, who received my decision with
joy. I am no more Rosamond the postulant, but plain
Rosamond Corbet. My only trouble is for dear Mother
Superior, who I know will grieve over me as a lost soul. Oh,
that she also might come to see the light!
I have announced my decision to my father and mother,

and I see they are both pleased. In recounting my motives,
I was led to tell them what had happened in respect to
Amice, and how that I had been secluded so long. I saw
them exchange glances.
"So that was the beginning of your fever!" said my father,

striking his hand on the table. "Had I known you were so
mewed up, I would have had their crows' nest down about
their ears."
I assured him earnestly, that I had not been ill-treated, but

quite the contrary; adding that I did not think Mother
Superior had any choice in the matter.
"There is the mischief!" said my father. "Nobody is

personally responsible. Every one is a puppet whose strings
are pulled by some other puppet, and his again by some
one else. 'Tis an utter and miserable slavery from the
beginning to the end, and the superiors are perhaps as
much to be pitied as any one."
"I cannot but feel that our Rosamond hath had a great
escape," said Madam.
"Do you think that there is any truth in what we have

heard, of nuns that have been built up alive in their tombs?"
I asked, remembering those grisly niches I had seen in the
chapel vault.
"I cannot say for certain, but I have little doubt of it; and
indeed 'tis only very lately that the thing has ever been
denied," answered my father. "I know that in the Low
Countries it has been a common punishment for heresy. Old
Will Lee saw a woman buried alive, and said she sung
joyfully till the earth stopped her breath; and I know that in
Spain and Italy, far worse things have been done by the
Inquisition. 'Tis not easy to get at the truth about what goes
on in convent walls. A nun has no refuge and no help. She
is away from her own family, who can only see her now and
then. By-and-by they are told that she is dead, but who
knows how and where she died? They might have told us
when we came to see you, that you had died weeks before,
of the sickness, and we should have taken their word for it,
and all the time you might have been shut up in some
prison."
"I can't think any such thing ever happened at our house," I
said. "Dear Mother Superior is too kind and generous. Alas I
fear her heart will be sorely wounded."
"I fear so," answered my mother, sighing, "and also many

another. 'Tis a part of the cross that these days of shaking
and separation lay upon us, that we must ofttimes seem to
desert those who are nearest and dearest to us. It is a
woeful necessity."
And here the conversation ended. My father is to send

letters to Mother Superior, to acquaint her with the matter,
and I have also written. My heart is sore grieved, but what
can I do?
CHAPTER XXX.
June 30.
MASTER HAWKINS, Harry's captain, hath been to see us.

He's a rough sea dog, as my father says, but yet kind and
good, as it seems to me, and with a clear, honest face that I
felt disposed to trust. Harry took to him greatly, and is more
than ever confirmed in his resolution of sailing. Master
Hawkins says Harry is like a young bear, with all his troubles
to come; but he adds very sensibly that troubles come
everywhere, and reminded my mother of her young cousin
whose father would not let him go to sea because he was
the only son, and who was drowned in a pond in his father's
orchard. The ships do not sail till the last of August, so we
shall have Harry for two good months yet.
Something happened this morning which has vexed me

more than I believe it is worth. I was down at Freshwater,
to carry some baby clothes and a bottle of sack to Meg Yeo,
who is not getting up well from her lying-in. I noticed that
two or three people stared at me curiously, and methought
there was something odd in Meg's own manner, which,
however, melted away under the influence of the baby linen.
While I was there, Dame Lee, Meg's mother, came in.
"So, Mistress Rosamond, you are looking fine and stout

again," said she, and then to her daughter: "Did I not tell
you, Meg, they were but idle tales yonder woman told?
Does our young lady look like one haunted by spectres, or
hunted by a cruel step-dame?"
Her words were spoken aside, but not so low as that I did
not hear them.
"What do you mean, dame?" said I. "Why should I look
otherwise than well, or like one haunted by spectres?"
"For no reason that I know, Mistress," answered the old

woman: "only fools will tell tales and other fools believe
them. Nay, Meg, thou need not be making signs to me. 'Tis
right Mistress Rosamond should know."
"Know what?" I asked. "You are all as mysterious as a

miracle play this morning."
"There is no great mystery in the case," said Dame Lee.

"The whole matter is this. The woman Patience Hollins,
whom Madam Corbet sent away, has been telling
everywhere that your step-dame obliged you to leave off
your convent dress, and break your vows, that she might
wed you to a needy kinsman of her own, and also that the
very night the change was made your honored mother's
spirit appeared to you, all surrounded with flames and
burning sulphur, and reproached you with your
disobedience, and declared that it had taken away her last
hope of salvation. Patience says she saw herself the boards
where the spirit had stood, and they were all burned black—
and that she saw the ghost also at a distance, and smelled
the sulphur."
"She saw the ghost as near as any one," said and with that
I told them the tale as it was.
"Lo, did I not tell you as much!" said the dame, turning to
her daughter. "The wicked wretch! She deserves to be
hung! But is it true, Mistress Rosamond, that you are not
going to be a nun, after all?"
"'Tis quite true," said I. "You know my brother is going to

sea, and my father and mother naturally want me at home,
and there are other reasons. But there was neither force
nor persuasion in the case. It was left to myself to decide,
and I have, as I believe, decided rightly."
"And I am glad on't with all my heart!" said Dame Lee,

heartily. "I am no believer in shutting up young maids in
convent walls. They may do for those who have no other
home. But what can Patience mean by telling such tales?"
"She means to hide her own disgrace and dismissal, no

doubt," said I. "She is a wicked woman, and I dare say will
work me all the harm she can. I suppose the whole village
is ringing with this absurd tale."
"I shall tell the truth about it wherever I go, you may be
sure," said Dame Lee. "Mrs. Patience is not now my Lady's
bower-woman, that I should dread her anger. She used to
abuse my late Lady's ear with many a false tale, as she did
about Meg here, because, forsooth, Meg would not wed her
nephew. But I shall let people know what her legends are
worth."
"Do so," said I.
And I doubt not she will; for besides that, the Lees have
always been attached to our family from the earliest times,
the good gammer dearly loves a gossip, and nuts to her to
be able at once to contradict Patience and to have the story
at first hand. Yet, such is the love of all people for the
marvellous, that I should not wonder if the ghost story
should continue to be believed, and that for many
generations. *
* She was right. It has been one of the family ghost

stories ever since. There are enough of them to make a
chronicle by themselves.—D. C.
CHAPTER XXXI.
June 30.
A GREAT event has happened, so unexpected that I don't

believe it even yet.
Three days ago, as we were all sitting at supper, comes in

Thomas and says, "Here is a gentleman from Cornwall to
see you, Sir Stephen."
"Have him in, man!" says my father. "Would you keep him
waiting?"
"Nay, but he is so bespattered with his journey," says
Thomas, "and wearied as well. He says his name is
Penrose."
"Penrose—Penrose—the name hath a familiar ring;" said my

father, musingly, and then: "Bid him never mind his
spatters, but bring him in. He must needs be sore wearied
and wet too, riding in this storm."
The gentleman presently entered—an elderly man and thin

—his riding dress plain, almost to shabbiness. My father
rose courteously to receive him.
"You do not know me, Stephen," says the stranger: "yet we

have been playmates many a day at Tremador Court—"
"Joslyn Penrose!" exclaimed my father, and then ensued a

cordial greeting enow.
"And how is my good aunt?" asked my father presently.

"She is an old lady by this time."
"She is gone where are neither old nor young," answered

the stranger, sadly. "My good old friend and patroness was
buried more than ten days ago. You should have been
bidden to the funeral, but the weather was warm, and we
had to hasten matters."
"'Tis just as well!" said my father. "I don't believe she would
have asked me if she had had her way, for I was never in
her good graces since the day I was so maladroit as to kill
her cat with my cross-bow. 'Twas a mere piece of ill-luck,
for I would not have hurt a hair of poor puss if I had only
seen her. Well, she is gone, and peace to her soul! I hope
she has made thee her heir, after all these years, Joslyn!"
"Nay, that she has not!" answered Master Penrose. "'Tis
even that which has brought me here."
"The old cat!" exclaimed my father.
"Wait till you hear, before you condemn!" answered our

guest.
But here my mother interposed. The gentleman was surely

too weary and hungry to be kept discoursing of business.
He should be shown to his chamber, and then come to
supper with us, before he said another word.
"And so she has kept Jos Penrose waiting on her like a slave
all these years, managing for her, and serving her more like
a servant than a kinsman, only to bilk him at last," said my
father.
"I would not have been kept waiting!" said Harry. "I would
have struck out something for myself."
"You would not if you had been Joslyn," answered my

father. "He was not one to do so. He could manage well
enough for others, but never could keep two groats
together for himself. Besides that his life was spoiled by a
woman, as many another man's life has been, and will be.
Take care, Harry, my son, that you pay him all due kindness
and deference."
By this time our guest had come back, and was soon seated
at the table, each of us being presented to him in turn.
When my turn came, Master Penrose looked earnestly at
me, as if he had some special interest in me.
"So this is the young lady," said he, smiling somewhat

sadly. "In truth, though favor may be deceitful and beauty
vain, as the wise man said, Mistress Rosamond hath that in
her face that makes me rejoice in her good fortune."
"Rosamond is a good maiden, as maidens go," said my

father: "but what mean you, Joslyn? What good fortune
hath befallen her? Has my aunt left her guardian of her
popinjay, or given her the reversion of that black damask
gown, I remember so well?"
"More than that!" answered Master Penrose. "Mistress

Rosamond is sole heir to Tremador, and all its
appurtenances. 'Tis a fine estate, for our part of the world—
not less than an hundred and fifty a year, though saddled
with a life annuity of twenty pounds a year to myself. Also, I
am to have my nest for life in the old tower where I have
lived so long, and a seat at table and in hall, unless Mistress
Rosamond objects."
"Mistress Rosamond is no child of her father's if she does!"

said Sir Stephen. "But are you sure? 'Tis passing strange! I
thought she would make you her heir, or else leave all to
the convent yonder. Rosamond was her namesake, 'tis true,
but she has never taken any more notice of the child than
to send her some old-fashioned gewgaws once on a time.
'Tis not right nor fair, Joslyn! You should have been the heir,
and not my daughter."
"Nay, I am well content!" answered Master Penrose. "My

wants are few, and if Mistress Rosamond will let me live
where I have lived so long, I shall not trouble her many
years."
My mother looked at me, and made me a sign to speak;

and though I was so covered with confusion that I could
hardly find words, I did manage to say that, so far as I had
any voice in the matter, I hoped Master Penrose would
always make my aunt's house his home. Then Master
Penrose kissed my hand and made me a pretty old-
fashioned compliment; and I was so confused and stunned
with it all, that I think, like a fool, I should have burst out
crying, only that my mother, seeing my trouble, came to my
aid and rose from the table.
"We will leave you to talk over matters by yourselves," said

she, courteously. "Rosamond is somewhat overcome, and
no wonder."
When I was alone with my Lady, I soon recovered myself.

She does not like to have me weep, and I am learning self-
control. We talked the matter over, and I said what I felt;
that I could not think my aunt had done right—that she
should have made Master Penrose her heir, and not a
stranger, whom she had never even seen.
"People, even very good people, often make very strange

and unjust wills," said my Lady; and with that she sighed
somewhat sadly. "But we will not conclude that your aunt's
will is of this kind, till we know something more of the
circumstances. She may have had good reasons for the
arrangement. You heard what your father said about Master
Penrose, that though a good manager for others, he could
never keep too groats together for himself. Some notion of
this kind may have governed my old Lady Tremador in
leaving him only an annuity."
"I am sorry about this, for one reason," said I, presently.

"People will say I chose a secular life, because I had this
fortune left me."
My mother smiled. "Shall I tell you a motto I saw once in

Scotland?" said she. "'Twas graven over a door, and ran
thus—'They haf said—What said they? Let them say!' 'Twas
an odd motto for such a place, was it not? But it may serve
well enough for us. Many things will be said about your
choice, without doubt, but what matter? Let them say."
"Yet one cannot be indifferent to what folks say of one,"

quoth I: "and I hardly know if it is right to be so."
"It is not right to be so indifferent as to provoke comment

needlessly," answered my Lady; "but when we know that
we have done right, we must be content to leave the rest."
My Lady then saying that I looked weary, sent me to bed,

and I saw our guest no more that night.
I feel well acquainted and at ease with him now, however,

and shall, I hope, be more so. 'Tis settled that next week
we are all—that is my father, mother, Harry and myself—to
go to Tremador to take possession, and see what is to be
done in the way of repairs and the like. Master Penrose
journeys with us. My father would gladly have taken Master
Ellenwood, on whose judgment he relies greatly in business
matters, but Master Ellenwood expects his brother from
Amsterdam to make him a visit. Master Jasper is said to be
a wonderful scholar, a friend of Erasmus, and very deep in
the new learning, both Greek and Latin.
My mother, who has been in Amsterdam with her first

husband, says she fears our housekeeping will seem very
rough and sluttish to Master Jasper's Dutch notions. She
tells me that in Holland they strew no rushes on the floors
even of their dining-halls, but that the floors are made of
fine inlaid woods or stones, and the same are washed or
rubbed with fine sand every day, and then waxed till they
shine like glass. Madam herself is counted over particular by
our men and maids because she will have all the rushes
renewed and the rooms thoroughly swept every week
instead of every month, as used to be the way. Also, we will
have no rushes in her chamber or mine, saying that they
breed fleas and other vermin, and hide the dust. Certainly
the air in our house is far sweeter than I remember it
formerly. But it seems a great deal of trouble to wash floors
every day, and I should think would be damp and
unwholesome. Probably in Holland a little water more or
less does not matter.
My Lady has told me much of the comfort and splendor in

which the Dutch merchants live, of their beautiful pictures,
presenting flowers and other objects in all the hues of life,
of their noble collections of books, and the quantities of fine
house linen, garments, and other things which their wives
lay up and provide against the marriage of their daughters.
I remember Mother Monica telling Amice and me that in her
day the merchants of London lived in far more comfort than
the nobles and courtiers.
This journey into Cornwall, which seems like a perilous

adventure to me, my Lady makes nothing of, save as she
seems to enjoy the thoughts of it. My father is going to stop
on the way at the house of Sir John Carey, who hath long
owed him a sum of money. He is a kinsman of our
neighbors at Clovelly, but they know little of him, save that
he last year lost his only son in some very sad way, that I
did not clearly understand. Sir John is now old and feeble,
and hath more than once sent asking my father to come
and see him, but it hath not been convenient hitherto.
CHAPTER XXXII.
July 20, Tremador, in Cornwall.
HERE we are, at this grim, sad old house, which yet hath a
wonderful charm to me, maybe because it is my house. It
seems such a surprising thing to call a house mine. We have
been here three or four days, and I am not yet weary of
exploring the old rooms, and asking questions of Mistress
Grace, my aunt's old bower-woman. The good soul took to
me at once, and answers all my queries with the most
indulgent patience. Albeit I am sometimes sore put to
understand her. Mistress Grace, it is true, speaks English,
though with a strong Cornish accent; but some of the
servants and almost all the cottagers speak the Cornish
tongue, which is as unknown as Greek to me. Master
Penrose, or Cousin Joslyn, as he likes best to have me call
him, who is very learned, says the language is related to
the Welsh.
Mistress Grace has also been very much interested in
dressing up poor Joyce. She has made the child a nice suit
out of an old one of her Lady's, combed and arranged her
tangled hair, and so forth, and 'tis wonderful how different
Joyce looks. She is really very lovely. She seems to like me
well, but clings most to my Lady, whom she would fain
follow like a little dog, I think. I wish she would get over
that way of shrinking and looking so scared when any one
speaks to her; but I dare say that will come in time, poor
thing. My mother says 'tis a wonder she hath any sense left.
But what a way is this of writing a chronicle! I must begin,
and orderly set down the events of our journey as they
happened.
It took some days to make our preparations, for my mother

would have me in suitable mourning before setting out. She
said it was no more than due respect to our aunt's memory,
seeing what she had done for me. 'Twas like putting on my
old convent weeds again; and strange to say, seemed as
new to me as if I had not worn black all my life long. Dick
(who has been away on some business of my Lord's,)
coming in upon me in the twilight, started as if he had seen
a ghost.
"I thought we had seen the last of that!" said he.

"Rosamond, I thought you had done with the convent
forever!"
"And so I have!" I answered; and told him how it was.

Methought he did not seem so well pleased as I should have
been, had such a piece of good luck befallen him.
"They will be more loth than ever to give you up!" said he.
"The estate of Tremador would be a fine windfall for them!
Rosamond, you have need to be on your guard! They will
not let you go without a struggle. Pray be careful and do not
wander away by yourself, especially while you are on the
journey, or in Cornwall."
"Why, what do you fear for me?" I asked. "You are not used
to be so timid." I wished the words unsaid in a moment, for
I saw that they hurt him.
"'Tis not for myself, if I am timid!" he answered me, with a

look of reproach; "but I suppose plain Dick Stanton, the son
of a younger son, must not be too free with the heiress of
Tremador!"
A year ago, I suppose, we should have had our quarrel out

and made it up again in our old childish fashion; but I did
not feel like that now.
"Richard," says I, "did you learn that fashion of speech out

of the book you would not lend me that day in the maze?
For I too have been studying it, and I have found no such
thing, but on the contrary a good deal about thinking no
evil," says I.
He had turned to go, but was back at my side in a moment.

"Forgive me, Rosamond!" he whispered; "I am very wrong!"
"That indeed you are!" said I. "Why should my aunt's will

make any difference between us, who have been playmates
from the time we were little children?"
"But we are not little children now!" he answered me, with a

strange break in his voice. "We are not children now, and
never can be again: and oh, Rosamond, I have been
cherishing such sweet hopes ever since I heard that you
had given up being a nun!"
I don't know what more he might have said, but my father

came in just then, and would have all the news of Dick's
journey; and we were not alone again.
"Richard and my Lord rode one stage with us beyond

Biddeford. My Lord and my father were deep in converse
(the roads being good for the first stage, we were able to
ride two abreast), and Richard rode by my side, Harry as
usual being close to my mother. But there was little chance
for any private converse, and I think we were both very
silent. My Lord would send one of his own men with us as
an additional guard, though methinks our own three, with
my father and Harry, should be enough.
"I would loan you Dick here, but that he is my right-hand

man—I cannot spare him," said my Lord, as we parted.
"Take care of your heart, my fair cousin, and do not lose it
to any of the Cornish knights. Remember, 'Better a poor
neighbor than a rich stranger.'"
"Aye, my Lord, but there is another proverb—'Better kind

strangers than strange kin,'" I answered.
"What, have you and Dick quarrelled? Nay, I shall not have
that!" whispered my Lord in mine ear, as he gave my cheek
a parting salute. "Be kind to him, my Rose of May! He was
faithful to you when he had many a temptation to be
otherwise."
Richard kissed my cheek, as usual, at parting, but there

was that in his look and the pressure of his hand—
[I don't know why I should have drawn my pen through

this, as it seems I did. I suppose I could not yet feel that
'twas no sin to think of my cousin. I knew then that Dick
loved me, and from my Lord's whisper, I could guess well
enough that he was no ways averse to the match, and yet I
felt, I know not how, as if I had committed a mortal sin for
which yet I could not repent. The truth was, I could not yet
quite come to feel that I was a free woman, at least under
no law but my father's will. I know I rode in a kind of dream
all the rest of that day.]
We reached the end of our stage about four of the clock,

tired and wearied enough, yet with no adventures more
than those which I believe befall all travellers, of tired
beasts and men, plentiful splashes of mud, and once or
twice a horse stuck fast in the mire and hardly got out
again. Cousin Joslyn being with us, we were in no danger of
missing the road, as we should otherwise have been, and
our numbers were great enough to keep in awe any bands
of robbers that we were likely to meet in these parts.
We stayed the first night at a farm-house, where the good

yeoman and his wife made us heartily welcome to the best
they had of fowls, bacon, clotted cream, and I know not
what country dainties, and we in return for their hospitality
told them the last news from London and the Court. They
had heard something even in this odd corner of the world of
the good Queen's disgrace, and the women were eager for
particulars.
"'Tis all the fault of the new doctrines—those pestilent

heresies that crawl over the land like palmer worms," said a
begging friar, a guest like ourselves, but methought scarce
so welcome. "'Tis they have put these maggots in the King's
head."
"Nay, I think you are wrong there," answered my father.

"'Tis true, Mistress Anne is reported for a Lutheran, and
maybe some of the same sort may build hopes on her
advancement; but Luther himself has lifted his voice
manfully against the divorce, and Tyndale—he who has set
forth this new translation of the Gospels—"
"The curses of Mother Church and all the saints upon him!"
interrupted the friar, spitting in token of his abhorrence. "He
is the arch fiend of them all—worse than Luther himself,
even!"
"Be that as it may, he hath written a letter against the

divorce, and that of the sharpest!" answered my mother.
"'Tis said his Majesty's wrath was aroused far more by the
letter than it was even by the translation of the Gospels."
"Aye, have they got the Gospels in English again?" said a

very old man, who had been sitting in a great chair,
apparently unmindful of all that was going on. (I had seen
with pleasure how neat and clean he was, and how careful
the good woman was to prepare his mess of food, serving
him with the best on the board.) "Well, well, the world goes
on, but methinks it goes back as well—"
"How so, good father?" asked my mother.
"Oh, 'tis but an old man's tale now, my lady; but when I
was very young—younger than your son yonder—there was
great stir about one Wickliffe, who, 'twas said, made an
English Bible. Our parish priest had one, and read it out to
us in the church many a Sunday, marvellous good words,
sure—marvellous good words. But they stopped him at last
and hied him away to some of their convent prisons. 'Twas
said that he would not recant, and they made way with him.
They said 'twas rank heresy and blasphemy—but they were
marvellous good words—I mind some of them now—'Come
unto me, and I will refresh you, ye weary and laden.' It ran
like that, as I remember: 'God loved the world so that he
gave his Son—that he who believed should have—should
have'—what was that again?"

Under The Bhasha Gaze Modernity and Indian Literature PP Raveendran All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Under The Bhasha Gaze Modernity and Indian Literature PP Raveendran All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Under the Bhasha Gaze: Modernity and

Indian Literature Pp Raveendran

Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of

Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First Edition published in 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the

prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted

by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics

rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022913249

Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.

contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

This book is an outcome of my long-​standing interest in Indian litera-

Subject: Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)

This is a study of Indian literature in the context of recent discussions

Modernity is a complex concept that subsumes within itself a number of

Introduction to my Texts, Histories, Geographies: Reading Indian Literature (Raveendran

The God of Small Things is a classic example of such a crisis in repre-

Although Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (3 volumes: 1947;

What is the everyday? In appearance, it is the insignificant and the

Lefebvre does not mention in this passage the everyday’s concurrence

I originally made in an essay on the subject in my book in Malayalam, Etirezhuttukal (Counter-​

"Dear mother," said I, "will you tell me what I shall do?"

"But, mother, you did give me to the cloister!" I said,

"And is not this the same?" I asked.

"Can I not come in to you, dearest mother?" I asked,

I had gone to sleep all tossed and undecided; but lying

I have announced my decision to my father and mother,

"So that was the beginning of your fever!" said my father,

I assured him earnestly, that I had not been ill-treated, but

"There is the mischief!" said my father. "Nobody is

"Do you think that there is any truth in what we have

"I fear so," answered my mother, sighing, "and also many

And here the conversation ended. My father is to send

MASTER HAWKINS, Harry's captain, hath been to see us.

Something happened this morning which has vexed me

"So, Mistress Rosamond, you are looking fine and stout

"For no reason that I know, Mistress," answered the old

"Know what?" I asked. "You are all as mysterious as a

"There is no great mystery in the case," said Dame Lee.

"'Tis quite true," said I. "You know my brother is going to

"And I am glad on't with all my heart!" said Dame Lee,

"She means to hide her own disgrace and dismissal, no

"Do so," said I.

* She was right. It has been one of the family ghost

A GREAT event has happened, so unexpected that I don't

Three days ago, as we were all sitting at supper, comes in

"Penrose—Penrose—the name hath a familiar ring;" said my

The gentleman presently entered—an elderly man and thin

"You do not know me, Stephen," says the stranger: "yet we

"Joslyn Penrose!" exclaimed my father, and then ensued a

"And how is my good aunt?" asked my father presently.

This book is an outcome of my long-standing interest in Indian litera-

I originally made in an essay on the subject in my book in Malayalam, Etirezhuttukal (Counter-