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Indian Literature and the World
Rossella Ciocca • Neelam Srivastava
Editors
Indian Literature
and the World
Multilingualism, Translation, and the Public Sphere
Editors
Rossella Ciocca Neelam Srivastava
English and Anglophone Literatures School of English
University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ Newcastle University
Naples, Italy Newcastle upon Tyne
United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-54549-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54550-3 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936368
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Cultura RM/Alamy Stock Photo
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
CONTENTS
Introduction: Indian Literature and the World 1

Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava
Part I Comparing Multilingual Perspectives
Pre-Nation and Post-Colony: 1947 in Qurratulain

Hyder’s My Temples, Too and Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children 35
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Reading Together: Hindi, Urdu, and English Village Novels 61

Francesca Orsini
Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s

Bilingual Algorithms 87
Udaya Kumar
Part II Enlarging the World Literary Canon: New Voices

and Translation
A Multiple Addressivity: Indian Subaltern Autobiographies

and the Role of Translation 105
Neelam Srivastava
v
vi CONTENTS
The Modern Tamil Novel: Changing Identities

and Transformations 135
Lakshmi Holmström
The Voices of Krishna Sobti in the Polyphonic Canon

of Indian Literature 153
Stefania Cavaliere
Part III Globalized Indian Public Spheres
Resisting Slow Violence: Writing, Activism,

and Environmentalism 177
Alessandra Marino
The Novel and the North-East: Indigenous Narratives

in Indian Literatures 199
Mara Matta
From Nation to World: Bombay/Mumbai Fictions

and the Urban Public Sphere 223
Rossella Ciocca
The Individual and the Collective in Contemporary India:

Manju Kapur’s Home and Custody 245
Maryam Mirza
‘Home is a Place You’ve Never Been to’: A Woman’s Place

in the Indian Diasporic Novel 263
Clelia Clini
Index 283
Introduction: Indian Literature
and the World
Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava
In what follows, we propose a working model of contemporary Indian

literature characterized by four features: firstly, it is multilingual, hence
our volume draws on the specific linguistic expertise of scholars whose
work is included in the collection; secondly, it is translational, so we
consider the process and politics of translation as central to the construc-
tion of a pan-Indian canon (also through the contribution of contempor-
ary publishing practices); thirdly, it is comparative, because it is necessary
to conceive of Indian literatures in the plural while arguing for the impor-
tance of comparing these literatures with each other as a way forward for
scholarship; fourthly, it is a simultaneously located and internationalist
literature, which we understand as being premised on a multilingual
literary sphere in which translation plays a prominent role. Rather than
attempting to approximate Indian literature to the fashionable centre–
periphery model adopted by critics who have used world-systems theory
to restructure the modern literary field, we look at its enduring
R. Ciocca (*)
English and Anglophone Literatures, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’,
Naples, Italy
e-mail: rciocca@unior.it
N. Srivastava
School of English, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
e-mail: neelam.srivastava@newcastle.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2017 1

R. Ciocca, N. Srivastava (eds.), Indian Literature and the World,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54550-3_1
2 R. CIOCCA AND N. SRIVASTAVA
engagement with the public sphere and with political resistance through a
variety of narrative and poetic forms which defy any categorization within
a singular model of literary modernism and which emanate from the
capitalist centres and are reappropriated by the peripheries (pace WReC,
2015: 14). Engaging in recent debates about the limitations of postcolo-
nial theoretical approaches to literature, this edited collection aims to offer
a different picture of contemporary Indian writing than what is currently
available today.1
BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL

The purview of postcolonial studies has mainly focused on the contours of
writing in English or in the other ex-colonial languages, beginning with
Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s seminal definition of the field in 1989, with
the publication of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
Colonial Literature (where it should be noted that the noun ‘literature’ is
very much in the singular). As a result, postcolonial literary studies has
been structured around a vast but still limited corpus of works. The field
has developed in several rich directions since the publication of seminal
texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1985), the collection of essays
Europe and Its Others (Barker et al. 1985) which came out of the cele-
brated eponymous 1984 conference at the University of Essex, and Robert
Young’s White Mythologies (White Mythologies (1990), to name just a few
of the works that have delineated the contours of the field we now know as
postcolonial studies. While intersections and cross-pollinations abound, it
is nevertheless helpful to distinguish between the vast body of postcolonial
theory that has emerged since the early 1980s, and the research in post-
colonial literatures that has led to the field’s institutionalization within
university teaching curricula in English Literature departments, and which
built on older models of Commonwealth or ‘new national’ literatures
coming out of recently decolonized regions. The gesturing of Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin to the many regional varieties of ‘post-colonial litera-
ture’ developing in the new nations of the erstwhile British Empire was
followed by the expansion of subfields such as Caribbean literature,
African literature, Pacific/Australian/New Zealand literature, Canadian
literature, and Indian literature (though of course significant scholarship
was being produced on such writing well before the academic institutio-
nalization of postcolonial studies). An important development has been in
INTRODUCTION: INDIAN LITERATURE AND THE WORLD 3
the area of postcolonial book history and print cultures, which focus
attention on the ‘postcolonial text’ as material production within the
cultural industry and institutions of literary value (see Huggan 2001;
Brouillette 2007; Sadana 2012).
Particularly in India, the founding idea of a postcolonial literature was
historically built around a primarily Anglophone canon of texts.2 It may be
worth recalling, once again, Salman Rushdie’s blithe pronouncement
regarding a supposed hierarchy between Indian prose writing in English
and in the vernacular languages post-1947: the former, he claimed,
is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of

what has been produced in the 16 ‘official languages’ of India, the so-called
‘vernacular languages’ [ . . . ] ‘Indo-Anglian literature’ represents perhaps the
most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books.
(Rushdie 1997: x).
This book is our counterargument to Rushdie’s statement. Given India’s

myriad cultural and linguistic varieties, it is all the more imperative to open
up critical approaches to a wider and much more multilingual survey of
contemporary writing from the subcontinent. There is still a sharp divide
between the study of South Asian languages and literatures and postcolo-
nial literary studies, and even more so between these and the field of world
literary studies. The study of ‘postcolonial Indian literature’ tends to imply
a mostly Anglophone focus, because it is mainly situated in English
Literature departments, whence postcolonial studies first originated
(though the term ‘post-colonial’ was initially used as a historical marker
for nations and regions that had undergone the decolonization process).3
Moreover, what might be called the ‘teaching canon’ of postcolonial
Indian literature rarely includes Indian literature in English translation,
and only considers a small body of texts written in English. Thus post-
colonial literature, especially as shaped by university syllabi and degree
course specifications, has tended to produce a monolingual canon. This
focus has restricted the genre’s usefulness for exploring the multicultural
and polyglot context of literary production in postcolonial South Asia, as
well as fostering a schizophrenic view of Indian literature as divided
between literature in the bhashas (Indian indigenous languages) and lit-
erature produced in English. Scholars have called for the development of a
different model of scholarship in order to understand how to approach this
complex field, which has been strangely bisected into Asian languages/
South Asian area studies disciplinary approaches on the one hand, and
postcolonial studies approaches on the other, with little communication
between the two.
Indeed, Neil Lazarus has criticized not only the linguistic scope of
postcolonial reading canons but the very substance of their critical agenda,
lamenting the fact that very often ‘the same questions tend to be asked,
the same methods used, the same concepts mobilized’ (2011: 18).
Without wholly espousing this assessment, but instead retaining much of
the political urgency and theoretical awareness the term ‘postcolonial’ has
carried with it, we would like nonetheless to enlarge our interpretative
perspective.4 One of our aims is to recuperate a linguistic competence
more strictly conversant with Indian literary production, and which has
historically belonged to area studies, a field that has been perhaps too
hastily dismissed in metropolitan academic circles as constitutively
Orientalist. The aim of refocusing our attention on linguistic expertise is
not meant to exclude English, but to assess its relative importance in the
multilingual spectrum of India.
In short, we are convinced that literature can and should be studied
with close attention to original languages and contexts, and thus we deem
particularly welcome contributions offered from a wider range of area
expertise and linguistic knowledge, and which combine the urge to con-
textualize, typical of postcolonial approaches, with a more direct field
experience guaranteed by specialisms.
THE QUESTION OF MULTILINGUALISM IN INDIA

As Rita Kothari and Judy Wakabayashi remark:
Indians moved within a multilingual structure, not necessarily thinking of

these languages as different languages, but rather as different registers of the
same language, each with a specific task—almost as if languages had their
own caste system and were assigned different jobs. In India, moving from
one language or dialect to another did not seem to constitute an act of
translation, but merely a confirmation of a multilingual world not overtly
conscious of its own multilingualism. (2009: 12–13).
India is also one of the very few places where you have the phenomenon of
writers who produce creative work in two languages: the poet Arun
Kolatkar for example, who writes in Marathi and English. Other examples
of bilingual poets include Kamala Das (whose early works are here ana-
lysed in Udaya Kumar’s essay), who writes in both English and Malayalam,
and A.K. Ramanujan, who wrote in English and Kannada. It is not
surprising, then, that most important reflections on translation in India
have come from the writers themselves. Qurratulain Hyder (here read side
by side with Salman Rushdie), in a parallel vein, perhaps, to this current of
bilingual poetry, has produced ‘transcreations’ of her Urdu novels into
English, such as River of Fire (Hyder 1998).
Among the different nation states comprising South Asia, namely India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Nepal, India is characterized
by the greatest number of languages. The Indian Constitution recognizes
eighteen official languages, plus numerous other languages and dialects.
This situation of multilingualism means that national identity in India was
never premised on a single linguistic identity, unlike the case of many
Western nation states. After independence in 1947, Hindi and English
became the two official languages of the Indian country, but then, given
India’s federal constitution, each state also had an official language.
In such a multilingual region, conceptualizing or even imagining a
national literary system has been complex, to say the least, given the
proliferation of language-literatures and the difficulty of using a single
paradigm for organizing literary study of this immense body of texts.
Indeed, any consideration of this question immediately raises another
one: how do we define literature in the Indian context? How do these
definitions—and the uses of a text in literary culture, as Sheldon Pollock
calls it—differ from or intersect with European understandings of
literary culture and its relationship to society, politics, and history
(Pollock 2003: 20)? One fundamental question raised by current debates
around the status of ‘world literature’ is nonetheless rarely explicitly posed
in them: namely, how does world literature differ from, or equal, literature
itself? Is it a variation, a subcategory, or merely a paraphrase of the
latter term?5
As a starting point, it is necessary to talk about Indian literatures in the
plural—both to highlight the multifarious production in different lan-
guages across the region, and to make visible the lines of continuity within
literary formations across national borders. In India, the Sahitya Akademi,
founded in 1954 (shortly after independence), aimed ‘to establish a
national organization to work actively for the development of Indian
letters and to set high literary standards to foster and co-ordinate literary
activities in all the Indian languages and to promote through them all the
cultural unity of the country’ (Sahitya Akademi 2016). And in its

Constitution, one of its explicit aims was to encourage and arrange trans-
lations among Indian languages. In other words, it fostered ‘literary
history as the story of the ever-emergent and now-realized nation’
(Pollock 2003: 6). For Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister,
the role of the Sahitya Akademi was to describe the individual literary
traditions in a way that would demonstrate ‘the essential unity of India’s
thought and literary background’ to the citizens of this new nation. In his
understanding, ‘Indian literature was one though written in many lan-
guages’ (Pollock 2003: 6).
India’s putative civilizational unity has been historically and theoreti-
cally contested, and Nehru’s emphasis on it had everything to do with the
nationalistic project which saw literary production as crucial to nation-
building. Nationalism also led to arbitrary ruptures and separations in
conceptualizing the political, cultural, and literary milieux of South Asian
languages. To give just one example of the complex interactions between
literary formations and national/religious divides, Urdu can be said to
belong to both India and Pakistan, as it is spoken in both countries—as
well as to the transnational communities throughout the world that speak
Urdu, in Europe, the USA, and Africa, among other regions. Moreover,
Urdu literature shares a language with Hindi literature, though they have
separate scripts and significant differences at a lexical level. The two
languages are often seen as separate for the reason that Urdu is now
identified with Pakistan, and Hindi with India, though this distinction is
highly problematic and the borders between the two ‘languages’ are
extremely porous.6 Many North Indians would easily understand Urdu,
as they belong to a region where a richly syncretic Indo-Muslim culture
developed, with many shared features between Hinduism and Islam,
including the language. Famously, Gandhi said that Hindustani was the
‘universal’ language of India—a word that for him signified an all-
encompassing notion of Hindi and Urdu together, and was designed to
unite Hindu and Muslim speakers, and reject the colonial hegemony of
English (Gandhi 1997: 105–106).
Trying to conceptualize an interlinked web of literary production across
India, in other words to try to imagine a literary system of some kind,
then, is a daunting task. Nationalist debates about the existence and status
of an Indian national literature before independence have often hinged
upon the issue of multilingualism and translation in the subcontinent, and
their role in the formation of a modern literary culture. The translation of
nationalist texts such as Hind Swaraj by Gandhi into English and other
Indian languages consolidated the practice of translation as key to the
construction of a national identity.7 But translation became a central issue
for both official and unofficial nation-building after India obtained its
independence from the British in 1947. Nehru fostered translation pro-
jects among the Indian languages in attempting to forge a ‘unity within
diversity’ in relationship to India’s multicultural and literary identity,
through the Sahitya Akademi. Francesca Orsini maps out the different
literary constituencies in India at three levels: the regional, national, and
international fields, which often do not share readerships, publishers, and
circuits of exchange, but produce separate and not always overlapping
canons (Orsini 2002a: 83). The role of translation can facilitate the con-
struction of a more unified and interconnected series of literary canons
across South Asia and across languages (so as to include transnational
linguistic communities, like Marathi, for example, whose writers’ meetings
often take place outside of the subcontinent).8
The essays in this book analyse a variety of contemporary Indian
texts across in their original English, English translations, and bhasha
(indigenous-language) originals. In showcasing such examples of criti-
cism, we aim to contribute to the construction of a literary canon that
is pan-Indian and functions as a useful model for the critical field of
world literary studies.
INDIAN LITERATURE: COMPARATIVISM THROUGH TRANSLATION

In a book-length argument against received notions of world literature,
Emily Apter makes a claim for the importance of translation and untran-
slatability as ‘constitutive of world forms of literature’ (2013: 16). Here
Apter invokes ‘untranslatability as a deflationary gesture toward the expan-
sionism and gargantuan scale of world-literary endeavours’ (16); against
the ‘entrepreneurial, bulimic drive to anthologize and curricularize the
world’s cultural resources, as evinced in projects sponsored by some
proponents of World Literature’ (3). Apter makes a strong case for
untranslatability—and indeed of translation as ‘creative failure’—as the
theoretical fulcrum of comparative literature that has a bearing on
approaches to world literature more generally. Taking the opposite view
to that of Apter, David Damrosch claims that world literature is writing
that ‘gains in translation’ (2003a: 281). The works that are not transla-
table without substantial loss, he remarks, ‘remain largely within their local
or national context, never achieving an effective life as world literature’

(Damrosch 2009: 288–289).
The idea of Indian literature represented by the essays in this volume
sketches out a comparativism through translation. Unlike Apter, however,
we seek to find a model for thinking about Indian literature that places
translation at the centre of its theorization, given the centrality that multi-
lingualism has both in Indian cultural production (literature and film are
but two prominent examples) and in everyday life. While we understand
Apter’s resistance to any easy equivalence between Weltliteratur and
translation studies, the case of the Indian literary system reveals the sub-
stantially Eurocentric premise of a notion of world literature based on the
untranslatable. Indian writing today can be said to consist of a multilingual
canon; it is a national literary system that is not premised on monolingu-
alism, unlike European literary contexts. Translation, thus, is not an
option; it is a necessity, especially in a country where many writers (and
readers) are often bilingual, if not trilingual. However, we are also mindful
of Nicholas Harrison’s critique of Damrosch’s idea that world literature is
enabled by translation; he instead draws attention to the text’s ‘integrity, a
notional inalterability, that poses a fundamental problem for paraphrase
and for translation’ (Harrison 2014: 418). This is why our understanding
of Indian literature is based on an interconnection and cross-fertilization
between translational and multilingual practices, exemplified by the code-
switching present in Indian fiction and the bilingualism of several of its
major poets.
As Kothari and Wakabayashi note, the exchanges between major and
minor streams in Indian literature have taken place largely through trans-
lation (2009: 9). Thus we should not view translation in India as merely a
process that privileges English as a language of translation, at the expense
of the productions of, and exchanges between, the bhashas. On the con-
trary, we can view the translating process as a way to ‘vary the major
language’, in Lawrence Venuti’s formulation (1998: 137). Comparativism
is inherently grounded in multilingualism and both implicitly and expli-
citly, on translation. Comparative literature by definition brings together
bodies of writing in different languages, and is premised on an acceptance
of multilingualism as a structural characteristic of the canon. Thanks to
translation, comparative literature allows texts to be appropriated by dif-
ferent literary systems from those of their origin, but also to escape
national paradigms and circuits of reception. As Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak says, ‘The verbal text is jealous of its linguistic signature but
impatient of national identity. Translation flourishes by virtue of that

paradox’ (2000: 21).
A focus on contemporary literary production in India must perforce be
linked to the constantly changing Indian publishing industry—its expansion
and specialization in response to new reading practices—of primary impor-
tance is also the appraisal of publishers’ translation policies. The very last
decades have seen in India an exponential increase not only of the ‘vertical’
translation of literary texts from the bhashas into English but also, and maybe
more significantly, between bhashas. The passage from Indian languages into
English evokes the well-known issue of the unequal power relations intrinsic
in translation. This recalls, in turn, the question posed by Pascale Casanova in
The World Republic of Letters (2004) regarding a model of competing
literatures within a world system of unequal national languages, in which
the promoters of the western literary centres determine access, diffusion, and
canonization for the authors of the peripheries. On the other hand, ‘hor-
izontal’ translational practices among Indian vernacular languages entail
influences and cross-pollinations that clearly necessitate a comparative
approach (Orsini and Srivastava 2013: 325–326).
Conceptualizing Indian literature(s) as a comparative literature, whose
various corpora are connected together through translation and multi-
lingualism, allows both the national and the comparative to co-exist. Most
Indian languages have a transnational reach that cannot be captured by a
focus on their usage on the part of speakers bound by national borders.
Taking up Franco Moretti’s idea of ‘distant reading’, but avoiding the
pitfalls of an excessively ‘national’ focus in literary studies, translation can
play a key role. If in ‘distant reading’, as Moretti says, distance ‘is a
condition of knowledge’ (2000: 57), then translation can be understood
as a more concrete form of ‘distant reading’ on which scholars rely to
investigate the possibility, if not of a civilizational unity, then of a civiliza-
tional coherence and the emergence of common trends among the diver-
sity of literatures in India.
To envisage Indian literatures in the plural as part of a comparative
model allows lines of continuity to emerge within literary formations
across these languages, creating ‘contact zones’ (Pratt 1991: 34) that
put paid to untranslatability as a heuristic tool for theorization. In some
instances, as we would like to demonstrate, translation assumes an ‘acti-
vist’ function in making a subaltern political struggle known to other
subaltern subjects, as is the case of Dalit authors; through translation, a
canon of Dalit writing and a shared political identity across different
linguistic communities is fostered. Translations between regional lan-

guages and between bhashas and English are, then, increasingly becoming
the cohesive factor in defining an Indian-specific contribution to theoriza-
tions of world literature.
RETHINKING WORLD LITERATURE

World literature has become a hegemonic force in the English humanities.
It is fast becoming the way to theorize any literary field of the contempor-
ary period that has aspirations to a global reach, subsuming postcolonial
literature, minority literature, and ‘Anglophone’/‘Francophone’ theore-
tical models. In the past 15 years, perhaps prompted or provoked by the
programmatic statements in Franco Moretti’s 2000 essay in New Left
Review, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, major scholars have dedicated
substantial studies to this evolving trend.9 For Damrosch, world literature
‘is defined by its reception in foreign cultures’ (2003b: 24). Some have
argued for the need of a located, critical approach to world literature
(Mufti 2016; Orsini 2002a); some have argued more forcefully that it
can only be understood as a system, with ‘world-literature as the literary
registration of modernity’, and have stated rather grandly that ‘modernity
is both what world-literature indexes or is “about” and what gives world-
literature its distinguishing formal characteristics’ (WReC 2015: 17).
There are those also, such as Emily Apter, mentioned earlier, who argue
‘against world literature’ and question the seamlessness of a global literary
public sphere in which texts and authors travel without barriers to free
movement of ideas and narratives.
In a provocative 2013 editorial in the on-trend Brooklyn-based jour-
nal n+1, its editors gave a critical narrative of so-called ‘World Lite’,
whose representative authors, global celebrities like Orhan Pamuk,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michel Houellebecq, and Salman
Rushdie, produce a more quietist version of earlier radical novels about
resistance, packaged for a ‘EU-niversal’ audience (‘World Lite’ 2013). In
lieu of the embattled backdrop of the ‘Third-World’, the n+1 editors
remarked, global authors today tend to write at one remove from such
struggles, often setting their novels in the context of the university (they
note that Adichie’s latest novel, Americanah, begins with the word
‘Princeton’). The n+1 essay was concerned with marking a literary
trend in the contemporary production of writing; recent critics, in a
parallel move, have been engaged in examining the reasons for world
literature’s hegemony in the literary criticism of contemporary texts,

especially those works whose authors are connected in some way to the
Global South. Aamir Mufti, in an interesting echo of the ‘World Lite’
piece, which situated the rise of global literature in the 1990s, argues that
‘the resurgence of world literature in our times—in academic discourse,
in the practices of literary publishing, and in reading habits in the Global
North and elite sectors of society world-wide—is in a strong sense a post-
1989 development, which has appeared against the background of the
larger neo-liberal attempt to monopolize all possibilities of the interna-
tional into the global life of capital’ (Mufti 2016: 91). The Warwick
Research Collective (WReC), in their recent manifesto of ‘world-litera-
ture’ (which they spell with a hyphen, acknowledging their debt to
world-systems theory), indeed subsume all literature produced under
the conditions of capitalism to this ‘global life of capital’, albeit with
the intent to highlight its inequalities and unevenness (2015).
In many ways, the precursor of world literature is what is still known as
postcolonial literature. Scholarship that developed the latter term has
tended to thematize the awareness of a linguistic and cultural difference
between texts produced in the metropole and those produced in the
postcolony; a difference that gets encoded in various ways, for example
through the idea of resistance. In our view, the term ‘postcolonial’ retains
a political edge and radical critique that is completely lost in the homo-
genizing term ‘world’. But there are proponents of the ‘world literature
model’ who argue that there can be a radical valence to the term; and
indeed Mufti, as well as the n+1 editors, reminds us of an earlier version of
world literature that took its premise from Marx and Engels’s Communist
Manifesto: ‘National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more
and more impossible, and out of the many national and local literatures a
world literature arises’ (1848: 16). Marx was writing against a form of
literary provincialism that posited national identity and a shared social,
cultural, and political habitus anchored to older modes of production as
the central concern of both writers and readers; this was an idea of
literature that was the basis of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined national
community’, profoundly nationalist, middle-class, but even more crucially,
aspirationally statist in its inception and development as a cultural form
(1991). Newer modes of production and what Marx called the ‘revolu-
tionary role’ of the bourgeoisie in bringing them about were enabling
wider sharing of cultural forms, and an increasing commonality in literary
production. Marx’s world literature gave birth to the idea of a literary
international, one that today might champion an internationalist litera-

ture as opposed to a globalized literature, as Mufti notes:
This mode of disappearance of literatures of the Global South in the literary

sphere of the North is thus linked to the disappearance of those varieties of
internationalism that had sought in various ways to bypass the circuits of
interaction, transmission, and exchange of the emergent global bourgeois
order in the postwar and early postcolonial decades in the interest of the
decolonizing societies of the South. (Mufti 2016: 91)
This internationalist literature consisted of ‘journalism, treatises, and

speeches, novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs necessarily written in a
given vernacular but always aimed at a borderless audience of radicals’
(World Lite 2013).
Internationalism in literature, or rather an internationalist literature,
was always necessarily premised on a multilingual literary sphere of readers
and writers, in which translation played a prominent role. Mufti, in his
recent erudite study of the relationship between Orientalism and world
literature—‘world literature was from the beginning an eminently
Orientalist idea’ (Mufti 2016: 36)—spends quite some time on the ambig-
uous status of translations, and especially English translations, in the
development of world literature, of which English is often assumed to be
the hegemonic language.10 English as the privileged medium of a globa-
lized literary discourse has, of course, often been the object of vehement
criticism for this very reason, and Mufti rightly points out that ‘world
literature itself has always signified a system of unequal relations between a
handful of Western languages—and above all English—and [ . . . ] lan-
guages of the South’ (Mufti 2016: 52). Mufti is specifically critical of
literary cultures, such as that of Pakistan, in which a recently successful
school of Anglophone writing has flourished along transnational connec-
tions that are oblivious to the history of more radical traditions of literary
collaborations that emerged at the time of the Bandung conference, and of
organizations such as the Afro-Asian Writers Association (2016: 93). To
use English as the default language of a globalized literary canon, both for
literary critics with their exclusive focus on Anglophone novels, and for its
practitioners who publish in the language, can seem like a stunningly
unimaginative and ahistorical move (thinking back to Rushdie’s famous
dismissal of post-independence Indian literature in vernacular languages,
cited earlier).
But there is another story to translation, and especially English as a

language of translation, that this volume aims to tell, and which is accom-
panied by a different approach to world literature that can speak more
clearly to its internationalist potential. English is not only a ‘EU-niversal’
language, to use the n+1 ironic dictum, eliding and suppressing the sub-
altern vernaculars; it is not only the language of a world literature that is
‘always marked by an attempt to conceive of the universalization of certain
aspects of modern bourgeois culture and society’ (Mufti 2016: 35); in
other words, it is not only the language of racial and class global hege-
mony. What if it can serve counter-hegemonic purposes, towards the
construction of a literary international rather than a globalized Euro-
American World Lite?
The aim of this volume is to offer a fresh perspective on contemporary
Indian literature by considering Indian literature(s) from a multilingual
dimension, on the one hand, and through the impact of translation, on the
other. We find the debates around world literature today useful for think-
ing about the status and theorization of Indian literature, but we want to
rethink this concept of world literature above and beyond ‘Anglophone
writing’, with a proper consideration of the relationship between the
bhashas and English as a language of translation in the subcontinent.
The notion of world literature is firstly, perspectival: from ‘where’ is the
literature produced by diverse peoples of the world constituted as world
literature? Some suggest that the centre–periphery model needs to be
adopted for this perspectival approach, where centres of literary produc-
tion and consumption roughly correspond to economic centres of the
world, versus its literary-economic peripheries (see WReC 2015). In the
view of the WReC, all of contemporary literature produced under the
conditions of capital ‘registers’ the inequalities of this condition in one
way or another, and this leads to innovations in the literary realm. Mufti
insightfully suggests that we might conceive of world literature, both in its
current avatar, and in its historical development, as a ‘border regime’,
rather than a literary system without or beyond borders (Mufti 2016: 9).
So what might it mean to assess the contemporary production of Indian
writing so as to arrive at a located yet outward-facing understanding of
world literature from within India? In other words, how do texts present
effects and constructions that engage, one might say, explicitly, with
broader transnational literary formations? And how does translation
enable us to imagine and theorize Indian literature from within India
itself, rather than as an object of study on a western postcolonial syllabus?
Such an internationalist view of Indian literature takes into account

the fact that subcontinental authors have always been deeply concerned
with the public sphere: defining it, intervening in it, constantly relating
literature to society and politics in an explicit way, and indeed imagin-
ing literature to have an explicitly sociopolitical function. Its enduring
engagement with the Indian nationalist movement has shaped twenti-
eth-century Indian literature in profound ways, one example among
many being the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association. If world
literature today can be conceived of as a corpus of texts that rise to
planetary status through the functioning of a world literary market
whose mechanisms of selection and gatekeeping rely on the university,
prize culture, and a multinational publishing industry (not to mention
the rise and rise of Amazon as a global book retailer), its main mechan-
isms for policing its borders are culture, language, and class.
Contemporary Indian writing as we and our contributors examine it
here is speaking to a different idea of world literature, a ‘worldly’
literature, a text that is explicitly imagining its own relationship to
history and society in a profoundly politicized way (though it is a
form of politics that can really only be conceived through literature).
In Edward Said’s sense of the term, worldly literature ‘affirms the
connection between texts and the existential actualities of human life,
politics, societies and events’ (1983: 5).
The question of addressivity comes to the fore in the various literary
texts under examination by our contributors; these texts project the reader
as an interlocutor and participant in the debate around societal and
cultural issues shaped through the discourse of literature, because such
debates are motivated by a political and civic urgency.
INDIAN LITERATURE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Several recent studies spanning from India’s pre-independence period to
the beginning of the twenty-first century use the ‘public sphere’ as a
notion with which to interrogate the role of literature and the media in
their interplay with society and politics. These reflections have, for exam-
ple, focused on the crucial role of Hindi language and literature in the
creation and development of a nationalist public sphere in late colonial
times (Orsini 2002b); on the role played by the novel and cinema in
inscribing the trauma of Partition in the postcolonial popular public
sphere (Daiya 2008); and have more recently concentrated on the impact
of new media like the Internet in the emergence of a globalized post-

millennial Indian public sphere (Rajagopal 2009). Far from constituting a
homogenizing interpretative practice, the adoption of the analytical fra-
mework of the public sphere, albeit sprung from a western version of
modernity, permits the specificities of the Indian literary and cultural
scene to emerge and connote the peculiarities of Indian modernity. The
aim of this collection is to show how, in diverse geographical, cultural, and
social contexts, imaginative writing has participated in the elaboration of a
self-reflective and discursive process, helping to delineate, firstly, the con-
tours of the independent nation’s imagined community and secondly, its
transnational diasporic expansion across the world, and recently its neo-
liberal globalized avatar.
Literature coming out of the colonial encounter has come to interro-
gate the ‘idea of India’ (Khilnani 2003) in its recurrent hopes and crises,
flaws, delusions, and betrayals, contributing at the same time to shaping
the very idea of being Indian itself. Negotiating each of the most relevant
passages of post-independence history, literary narration has played an
active role in constructing first the national, then also the post-national
and even the anti-national sense of belonging, breaking away ‘from the
initial anti-colonial and nation-building project toward the expression of
“internal dissent”’ (Sunder Rajan 2011: 211). It is also certainly through
literature that a transnational sense of community via the Indian diaspora,
one of the largest migrant groups in the world, is fostered across the
boundaries of the state and given an arena of self-interrogation and
expression. As Om Prakash Dwivedi has remarked in Tracing the New
Indian Diaspora (2014): ‘Not only has the meaning of culture as a
singular entity undergone a critical change, but so has the idea of nation
and belonging’ (XIV).
The first nineteenth-century narrative experiments voiced anti-colonial
feelings (Joshi 2002), even before the emergence of a fully organized
political movement, and at the turn of the twentieth century became
increasingly committed to a form of cultural activism. As recalled by
Alessandra Marino in her essay, the literary movement that best exem-
plified this trend was the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association
(AIPWA), which in the early 1930s programmatically expressed the
exigencies of rebellion against internal obscurantism as well as foreign
domination. The writers of this association proclaimed in their 1934
manifesto that the new literature of India had to ‘deal with basic pro-
blems of existence today—the problems of hunger and poverty, social
backwardness and political subjugation, so that it may help us to under-

stand these problems and through such understanding help us to act’
(quoted in Mir and Mir 2006: 27). The members of the group, assuming
the responsibility of giving artistic articulation to the evils that plagued the
country, had the declared goal of finding a new mode for social involve-
ment and politically active participation. The following essays show how
over time, in postcolonial India, literature has continued the legacy of the
AIPWA, registering the impact on civil society of all the major historical
events, from Partition’s carnage to the traumas inflicted on democracy by
the Emergency, from tribal and peasant insurgencies and the spread of
guerrilla warfare to the sectarian religious upheavals of the 1990s, from
ecological disasters and environmental emergencies to the swamping
impact of migration flows into the big cities. Literature has substantially
contributed to the construction of a collective memory, giving the Indian
community—including resident citizens, transnational Non-Resident
Indians (NRIs), and Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs)—a common past
to identify with. Crossing the lines between public and private, urban and
rural, state and regional, national and transnational, narrative forms have
articulated their ethical and political discourses, and have taken an increas-
ingly active role in the ongoing conversation about public matters and the
common good.
Indeed, literature as a reflection of and on sociopolitical dynamics and
as a consciousness-generating site occupying a strategic location for
processing identities and worldviews, is by now an accepted concept
(Mukherjee 2010; Mohanty 2011; Biswas et al. 2011; Attridge 2015).
Narrative’s structural function in articulating subjectivity within
the social universe had already been recognized by Jürgen Habermas in
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). Habermas’s
discussed and contested, but nonetheless seminal, model of the public
sphere has often been criticized for having essentially emphasized the
more rational forms of communication and ignored the subtler role
played by affect and emotions in the creation of public opinion. But
already in his initial establishment of the field he had clearly identified
certain roots of emerging civil society in the eighteenth century in the
cultural products of print capitalism, in particular the new genre of the
novel. And again in Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a
Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1992), Habermas spoke expli-
citly of a literary public sphere intertwined with the properly political
one: ‘Problems voiced in the public sphere first become visible when they
are mirrored in personal life experiences’ (in Gripsrud et al. 2010: 188).
For Habermas these experiences find their concise expression in the
‘literary public sphere’, which he describes as ‘specialized for the articu-
lation of values and world disclosure’ (2010: 188).
In similarly assigning artistic narratives the specific features of revelation
and discovery, more than one critical inquiry has recently focused on the
transformative power of written stories and their capability to disclose new
worlds. Salman Rushdie’s reflections (1991) and Homi Bhabha’s more
articulated critical encoding (1994) about the potential of the literary
imagination to make ‘newness enter the world’ have come to vindicate
literature’s distinct power to create representations capable of shaping the
general comprehension of social facts. That is, the question of not only
what art is, in aesthetic terms, but what art does as a process, has been
repeatedly posed and theoretically answered. Arjun Appadurai (1996), in
his attempt to delineate an ‘anthropology of representation’, assigns a
specific and effective social agency to the literary imagination above
other media. ‘Readers of novels and poems can be moved to intense
action [ . . . ], and their authors often contribute to the construction of
social and moral maps for their readers’ (1996: 58). And Stuart Hall
(1992, 1997), during his lifelong reflection on the signifying practices of
cultures, has insistently claimed for representation a much more active and
creative role in relation to the way people think about the world and their
place within it.
Satya P. Mohanty, more recently, asserting the ‘epistemic’ dimension of
literature, clearly shows how narrative forms and social critique are closely
linked, and how creative writing ‘often through its formal experiments,
develops social and moral theories’ (2011: 5). Still more recently, Derek
Attridge (2015) has reconceptualized the work of literature, referring both
to the process and the artefact, as labour that implies a process that takes
time and produces consequences, and to which he refers as an ‘event’. In
The Work of Literature, Attridge posits the specificity of literature as
invention, an apprehension both of inner and outer worlds. Maintaining
that a cultural constellation is sustained by a geography of inclusions as
well as exclusions and that only the artist is able to find a way into this
landscape of exclusions, the ‘serious’ writer, in discovering something
genuinely different, brings to life an original creation that will effect a
change in society, through the changes it brings about in its readers. To
read a novel, and enjoy its sorties into what feels like new territory, is thus
to experience a transformation in one’s own ‘complex of attitudes,
aptitudes, habits of thought and feeling, and pieces of knowledge, formed

as the impress of the broader culture’ (2015: 29). By challenging ruling
assumptions about the options available in human relations, about allow-
able emotions, about ideas and knowledge of the physical or psychic
world, literature enables us to reconceive reality and reframe our approach
to it. Spinning relational webs between individual experiences and the
social universe, narration knits together the drives, the feelings, and the
opinions of the individual with the context of social intercourse and is
capable of triggering cultural collective processes of slow, indirect, but
lasting change. Drawing on the difference between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’
kinds of public spheres (Fraser 1991), narrative has of course no direct
right of entrance into the institutional level of decision-making, but by
questioning history, the economy, the organization of power, and the
systems of class or gender relations while telling a story, it proves none-
theless able to promote forms of individual political concern predisposed
in the long run to turn into collective political impact. Unlike the political
arena, in which opponents are easily constructed as enemies, a cultural
public sphere can more easily open dialogic spaces in which to interrogate
difference. Literature, by making readers walk in the shoes of others
through narrative identification, is particularly able to transform ideologi-
cal antagonism into a softened form of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe
1999) in which difference is more easily bridged. Working along and
sometimes even across the lines of traditionally intense divides, such as
gender, caste, and religion, Indian literature has indeed helped to open
up a cultural space for self-assertion and possible mutual recognition,
which is endowed with emancipatory potential. As John Marx says in his
reflection upon the role of literature in postcolonial ‘failing states’, fiction,
while offering a humanizing counterpoint to the cold facts of statistical
calculation, ‘does not simply flesh out social-scientific practice. Instead,
it shapes a counter-discourse’ (2008: 599).
In a country still characterized by social exclusion and cultural con-
striction, print narrative is striving to promote the possibility of speaking
against caste, religious, or ethnic traditional impediments, and of orches-
trating, through diverse cultural idioms and styles, a political confronta-
tion among emerging counterpublics. The concept of alternative publics
formed by subaltern subjects creatively appropriating and refashioning
their horizons of experience was conceived by Negt and Kluge (1993) as
proletarian ‘counter-publics’ moving away from the hegemonic bour-
geois public sphere. Such a concept can be usefully applied in reframing
the literary sphere in contemporary India. Kavita Daiya, who has brilliantly
elaborated her own conception of an Indian postcolonial public sphere,
drawing on Negt and Kluge’s ‘counter-publics’ theory, defines these as
‘saturated with everyday experiences and fantasy of citizen-subjects who
participate in the social collective process, create relationality between every-
day life and politics, and counter the alienation and fragmentation of
social life’ (2008: 32). Reconceptualizing the literary public sphere as a
site of discursive contestation, in which social adversaries can nonetheless
get involved in a dialogic understanding of each other, enlarges the idea
of the public sphere from an arena of rational consensus to a much more
fluid milieu which promotes cultural translation among diverse social
subjects.
According to Nancy Fraser (1991, 2007), a just society is characterized
by a parity of participation in the process of opinion formation. In India,
this parity is far from being within reach, but very slowly and nonetheless
increasingly, a multicultural literacy is working on the new porousness
between different social spheres. Opening connective trajectories between
social groups, this multicultural literacy erodes the language divide
through translation and enables the emergence of counterpublics.
Women’s rights, Dalit rights, the rights of tribal and other marginal
groups (as Srivastava, Matta, and Holmström show in their essays) acquire
viability from the intimate narrative revelation of their predicaments, and
their demands are, slowly and with difficulty, at last becoming a matter of
public concern. Forms that engage intensely with personal, individual,
affective material thus trigger a discursive process on civic and political
matters. Newly shaped subjectivities, often in opposition to majoritarian
notions of Indian identity, find expressive focus and social cognizance in
literature. Dalit, tribal, immigrant, or other marginal literary voices, when
they enter the artistic dimension, are thus able to build constellations
of new horizontal solidarities, beyond regional or linguistic separations,
gaining strength in addressing mainstream identities and worldviews.
By making such counterpublics, traditionally demarcated by class, gender,
ethnic, or religious rifts, enter a wider arena of mutual recognition, litera-
ture is orchestrating a wider social polyphony.
Connecting personal experiences, the feelings and postures of the
individual, to social collective processes, this literature interlocks everyday
lives with politics, and enables us to reconceptualize the popular public
sphere as a context of social intercourse mediated by the construction of
subjects in and through narration. As Mohanty says: ‘Such literary
readings can alert historians and social scientists to the range of expressive
forms that disempowered social agents can employ, even when their power
to shape their material lives is severely limited’ (2011: 4).
Imbricated in material as well as psychological structures of relation, the
narrative subject of fictional worlds inhabits India, and its idea, and inter-
rogates its history and present economic model, the organization of
society in the urban mainland and the liminality of peripheral borderlands.
Representations of neo-liberalism and the end of the Nehruvian ethos,
development and eco-critical activism, casteism and access to literacy,
gender, and diaspora become dominant themes in writing from and
about the subcontinent. Positing the existence of a ‘literary affective public
sphere’, this book investigates some of the most marginal perspectives and
a variety of genres, exploring intersections between Anglophone and
bhasha literatures and between novelistic and other discourses on India,
such as the autobiography, the diary, and the testimony, questioning
changing notions of authorship and the role of translation in creating
communities of common interest. Troubling the traditional sociologi-
cal/psychological divide, the essays interrogate this literature from the
perspective of its constant interactions between private and public narra-
tives, thereby proposing a method of reading Indian literary texts that tries
to go further than their initially attractive postcolonial identifications as
‘national allegories’. As John Marx efficaciously states: ‘If reaction to
Fredric Jameson’s argument about the “necessarily . . . political dimen-
sion” of postcolonial literature taught us nothing else, it taught us to
appreciate the enormous variety of ways contemporary fictions reconfigure
the public/private distinction we have been taught to think of as tradi-
tionally bourgeois’ (2008: 611–612).
Distancing themselves from Fredric Jameson’s well-known and highly
controversial assumption that in postcolonial literatures ‘the story of the
private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society’ (1986: 69, emphasis in the
original), the essays in this collection aim to reverse that perspective and
posit the category of a public cultural sphere as constituted by ‘private
individual destinies’ through the contribution offered by literature’s affec-
tive agency. And in response once again, then, to the question about the
value of literature in the humanities today, we answer by pointing, as
Graham Huggan does, to the capacity of literature not only ‘to imagine
the ways in which reality has been, or might be, interpreted, but also to
affect the ways in which reality is produced’ (2008: 13).
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This collection comprises 11 essays which analyse a variety of contempor-
ary Indian texts variously written in the major Indian languages, in
English, and in their English translation from the original bhashas. They
have been organized in three sections roughly corresponding to the sub-
themes of our title: multilingualism, translation, and the public sphere. In
the first section, Part I: Comparing Multilingual Perspectives, a number of
essays deal with the problematic, highly engaging realities of Indian
multilingualism.
For example, in her essay ‘Pre-Nation and Post-Colony: 1947 in
Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children’ (Chapter 2), Rajeswari Sunder Rajan offers a comparative read-
ing of two authors who usually occupy discrete segments of the subconti-
nent’s literary map. Drawing a comparative trajectory between two works
representing two distinctive narrative modalities of capturing time, Sunder
Rajan opens a dialogue between Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too
(1948, original title Mere Bhi Sanam Khane) and Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children (1981), written respectively in Urdu and in English.
One date is central to both the novels analysed: Independence Day,
August 15, 1947 in India, and August 14 in Pakistan. What is significant
is that despite the different linguistic literary worlds they inhabit—poetical
Urdu (Hyder) and globalized pan-Indian English (Rushdie)—the two
novelists share a similar commitment to nationalist ideals of secularism,
cosmopolitanism, and syncretism. In reading them together, Sunder Rajan
is able to demonstrate that, despite their varying strategies in constructing
versions of history and fiction, they provide complementary and some-
times converging perspectives on the independent nation’s ethos and
public memory.
Francesca Orsini, in ‘Reading Together: Hindi, Urdu, and English
Village Novels’ (Chapter 3) similarly maintains that to take multilingual-
ism seriously means considering works written in different languages but
with shared topics or milieu, in order to compare both their literary
sensibilities and their social imaginaries. In her essay’s specific case, rural
Awadh offers an excellent example as the site of many intersecting pro-
cesses and discourses—of shared Hindu-Muslim sociality/culture and
Muslim separatism, of nostalgia for a sophisticated culture and critique
of zamindari exploitation and socio-economic backwardness. ‘Reading
together’ Shivaprasad Singh’s Hindi novel Alag alag vaitarṇī (1967),
Qazi Abdul Sattar’s Urdu novel Shab-gazīda (1988), and the Awadh
subplot in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993), Orsini explores their
capacity to frame Awadh culture, and comparatively shows how much
ground and sensibility they share, and how they fit within broader tradi-
tions of ‘village writing’ in India.
‘Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s Bilingual
Algorithms’ by Udaya Kumar (Chapter 4) shifts the focus of attention to
bilingualism as one possible locus of Indian literary landscape. Kumar
concentrates on Kamala Das’s status as a bilingual writer who at the
beginning of her career chose the English language for her poetic writing
and Malayalam for her short stories. The author suggests that a close
consideration of the economies of expression in Das’s early poetry and
short fiction permits us to explore her bilingual compositional method in
relation to questions pertaining to the mother tongue, but also relating to
location and translation. Paradoxically, says Kumar, while Das’s poetry in
English displays a directness and fluency usually associated with prose, her
early prose fiction draws on arrangements of language forged in the
neighbourhood of the poetic. Kumar’s essay demonstrates how such a
productive deployment of genre instability enables Das’s stories to fabri-
cate an unusual perceptual apparatus which works by generating gaps
between narration and description as well as between inner thoughts and
external expressions of characters.
Part II is entitled Enlarging the World Literary Canon: New Voices and
Translation. In her opening essay of the section, ‘A Multiple Addressivity:
Indian Subaltern Autobiographies and the Role of Translation’
(Chapter 5), Neelam Srivastava argues that the field of South Asian
literary studies needs to train its gaze more sharply on the process of
translation. She examines the development of a distinct genre, the ‘sub-
altern autobiography’, which is encoded as a product of translation prac-
tices in India, practices that differ distinctly from the western context.
Firstly, this is because in India the role of the translator is a much more
visible figure, and secondly, because translation assumes a political func-
tion in fostering alternative canons, and can be linked to the development
of a politicized identity across languages. In particular, this essay focuses
on a number of Indian autobiographies by subaltern authors translated
from Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali into English, in which the
importance of the author versus translator is often inverted through the
unequal power relations inherent to the two languages involved. Through
the focus on these autobiographies, Srivastava examines some trends in

translational practices in India in order to look at how certain genres have
migrated across languages, and become part of an increasingly proble-
matic ‘global’ canon.
We are very honoured to have been able to include a contribution
by Lakshmi Holmström, who sadly passed away before this volume
could appear in print. A translator by official profession, in her essay
‘The Modern Tamil Novel: Changing Identities and Transformations’
(Chapter 6), she continues this articulation of voices and genres of the
contemporary Indian multilingual canon by introducing the reader to
Tamil fiction and the impact of translation on it. Holmström recon-
structs the development of the modern novel in Tamil in the past
decades, discussing in particular some authors deemed as extremely
influential on the course of recent Tamil literary history.
Ashokamitran, Sundara Ramaswamy, Ambai, and Bama (one of whose
texts, Karukku, is also discussed by Srivastava), have narrated the story
of the individual in times of political and social change both in Tamil
Nadu and in India, each bringing their own innovative point of view to
the story, and covering feminist, Dalit, and diasporic perspectives. Many
important works by these four novelists have been translated into other
Indian languages as well as into English. Some have been translated into
European languages such as French, Spanish, and German. Yet some
translations have taken on a life of their own, while others have not. In
the essay’s final remarks, the relationship between the original text and
its successful translation is explored.
The last contribution of this section is Stefania Cavaliere’s essay ‘The
Voices of Krishna Sobti in the Polyphonic Canon of Indian Literature’
(Chapter 7). Considering Hindi as a major Indian language and the
language of the nation, Cavaliere analyses the modern state as depicted
in the works of Krishna Sobti. This great author of Hindi literature is
among the writers who have seen India through its pre-independence,
Partition and post-independence years, and the great changes that the
country has gone through are reflected in her writings, which offer a
comprehensive account of contemporary society. Sobti’s novels, and
their translations from Hindi into the other Indian languages, English
included, pose new questions about femininity and power structures by
depicting modern women continuously fighting to negotiate their own
identity in the new nation. Offering an enduringly original outlook on the
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also received an Aneityumese Teacher to their village, protecting and
showing kindness to him; one of the Sacred Men who could speak his
language lived almost constantly with him, and some young people
were allowed daily to attend our School. These two and a number of
others began to wear a kilt, and some a shirt also. Three of them
especially, if not Christians, appeared to be not far from the Kingdom
of God, and did all that was in their power to protect and to assist
me. A few began to pray to Jehovah in their houses, offering a kind of
rude family worship, and breathing out such prayers and desires as I
had taught them for the knowledge of the true God and only Saviour.
And these, as my companions, accompanied me from place to place
when I visited their district.
But let us return to the war. Many Chiefs and villages were now
involved in it; and a large part of the bush over the country between
had been consumed by fire, to prevent surprises. Yet, our Harbour
people being assembled one night for consultation, a number of the
Inland warriors crept near unobserved and discharged a volley of
muskets amongst them. Several were shot dead, and in the darkness
and confusion the enemy got clear away. Revenge and self-
preservation now united our people as one man, and every man
assembled for action on the borders of the hostile Tribes. I again
visited them on the fighting ground. As I was seen approaching, the
two old Priests, my friends, came to receive and escort me, protected
by their clubs and muskets,—the one blind of an eye lost in war
marching before me, and the other behind me with poised spear and
mighty club. Seating me in a central position, they assembled all the
warriors, except the watchmen, and these savage men listened
attentively to my message, and bowed quietly during prayer. God
only knows what may be the fruit in some dark benighted soul! The
whole host of them ceased firing, till the two friendly Priests had
again conveyed me safely beyond the reach of danger.
Going among them frequently thus, they treated me with
exceptional kindness, till one Sabbath I determined to go over and
talk with the enemy also, in the hope of getting this sad war put an
end to. Our people were sternly opposed to this, not for fear of my
safety, but lest I prayed for the enemy and my God might help them
in the war. But my two friends, the old Priests, persuaded them to let
me go, and to cease their shooting till my return. They had an idea to
buy, in this way, my intercession with Jehovah exclusively on their
behalf; but I explained to them as on former occasions, that I was
there for the good of all alike, that I loved them all and sought to lead
them to give up war and bad conduct, for my God would hear and
bless only those who feared and loved and obeyed Him. I had a long
interview with the enemies also, arguing against the evils of war, and
urging them to give it up. They were so far friendly; they allowed me
to have worship amongst them, and I returned in safety before
another musket was discharged on either side. The war still went on,
though more languidly; but after a time the leaders entered into a
kind of truce, and peace reigned for a season.
The other Mission Station, on the south-west side of Tanna, had to
be visited by me from time to time. Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson, there,
were both in a weak state of health, having a tendency to
consumption. On this account they visited Aneityum several times.
They were earnestly devoted to their work, and were successful so far
as health and the time allowed to them permitted. At this juncture, a
message reached me that they were without European food, and a
request to send them a little flour if possible. The war made the
journey overland impossible. A strong wind and a high sea round the
coast rendered it impracticable for my boat to go. The danger to life
from the enemy was so great, that I could not hire a crew. I pled
therefore with Nowar and Manuman, and a few leading men to take
one of their best canoes, and themselves to accompany me. I had a
large flat-bottomed pot with a close-fitting lid, and that I pressed full
of flour; and, tying the lid firmly down, I fastened it right in the
centre of the canoe, and as far above water-mark as possible. All else
that was required we tied around our own persons. Sea and land
being as they were, it was a perilous undertaking, which only dire
necessity could have justified. They were all good swimmers, but as I
could not swim the strongest man was placed behind me, to seize me
and swim ashore, if a crash came.
Creeping round near the shore all the way, we had to keep just
outside the great breakers on the coral reef, and were all drenched
through and through with the foam of an angry surf. We arrived,
however, in safety within two miles of our destination, where lived
the friends of my canoe’s company, but where a very dangerous sea
was breaking on the reef. Here they all gave in, and protested that no
further could they go; and truly their toil all the way with the paddles
had been severe. I appealed to them, that the canoe would for certain
be smashed if they tried to get on shore, that the provisions would be
lost, and some of us probably drowned. But they turned to the shore,
and remained for some time thus, watching the sea. At last their
Captain cried,—“Missi, hold on! There’s a smaller wave coming; we’ll
ride in now.”
THE DANGEROUS LANDING THROUGH THE SURF.
My heart rose to the Lord in trembling prayer! The wave came

rolling on; every paddle with all their united strength struck into the
sea; and next moment our canoe was flying like a sea-gull on the
crest of the wave towards the shore. Another instant, and the wave
had broken on the reef with a mighty roar, and rushed passed us
hissing in clouds of foam. My company were next seen swimming
wildly about in the sea, Manuman, the one-eyed Sacred Man, alone
holding on by the canoe, nearly full of water, with me still clinging to
the seat of it, and the very next wave likely to devour us. In
desperation, I sprang for the reef, and ran for a man half-wading,
half-swimming to reach us; and God so ordered it, that just as the
next wave broke against the silvery rock of coral, the man caught me
and partly swam with me through its surf, partly carried me till I was
set safely ashore. Praising God, I looked up and saw all the others
nearly as safe as myself, except Manuman, my friend, who was still
holding on by the canoe in the face of wind and sea, and bringing it
with him. Others ran and swam to his help. The paddles were picked
up amid the surf. A powerful fellow came towards me with the pot of
flour on his head, uninjured by water. The Chief who held on by the
canoe got severely cut about the feet, and had been badly bruised and
knocked about; but all the rest escaped without further harm, and
everything that we had was saved. Amongst friends, at last, they
resolved to await a favourable wind and tide to return to their own
homes. Singing in my heart unto God, I hired a man to carry the pot
of flour, and soon arrived at the Mission Station.
Supplying the wants of our dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. Mathieson,
whom we found as well as could be expected, we had to prepare,
after a few hours of rest, to return to our own Station by walking
overland through the night. I durst not remain longer away, lest my
own house should be plundered and broken into. Though weak in
health, my fellow-Missionaries were both full of hope, and zealous in
their work, and this somewhat strange visit was a pleasant blink
amidst our darkness. Before I had gone far on my return journey, the
sun went down, and no Native could be hired to accompany me.
They all told me that I would for certain be killed by the way. But I
knew that it would be quite dark before I reached the hostile
districts, and that the Heathen are great cowards in the dark and
never leave their villages at night in the darkness, except in
companies for fishing and such-like tasks. I skirted along the sea-
shore as fast as I could, walking and running alternately; and, when I
got within hearing of voices, I slunk back into the bush till they had
safely passed, and then groped my way back near the shore, that
being my only guide to find a path.
Having made half the journey, I came to a dangerous path, almost
perpendicular, up a great rock round the base of which the sea
roared deep. With my heart lifted up to Jesus, I succeeded in
climbing it, cautiously grasping roots, and resting by bushes, till I
reached safely to the top. There, to avoid a village, I had to keep
crawling slowly along the bush near the sea, on the top of that great
ledge of rock; a feat I could never have accomplished even in daylight
without the excitement, but I felt that I was supported and guided in
all that life or death journey by my dear Lord Jesus. I had to leave the
shore, and follow up the bank of a very deep ravine to a place shallow
enough for one to cross, and then through the bush away for the
shore again. By holding too much to the right, I missed the point
where I intended to reach it. Small fires were now visible through the
bush; I heard the voices of the people talking in one of our most
heathen villages.
Quietly drawing back, I now knew where I was, and easily found
my way towards the shore; but on reaching the Great Rock, I could
not in the darkness find the path down again. I groped about till I
was tired. I feared that I might stumble over and be killed; or, if I
delayed till daylight, that the savages would kill me. I knew that one
part of the rock was steep-sloping, with little growth or none thereon,
and I searched about to find it, resolved to commend myself to Jesus
and slide down thereby that I might again reach the shore and escape
for my life. Thinking I had found this spot, I hurled down several
stones and listened for their splash that I might judge whether it
would be safe. But the distance was too far for me to hear or judge.
At high tide the sea there was deep; but at low tide I could wade out
of it and be safe. The darkness made it impossible for me to see
anything. I let go my umbrella, shoving it down with considerable
force, but neither did it send me back any news.
Feeling sure, however, that this was the place I sought, and
knowing that to await the daylight would be certain death, I prayed
to my Lord Jesus for help and protection, and resolved to let myself
go. First, I fastened all my clothes as tightly as I could, so as not to
catch on anything; then I lay down at the top on my back, feet
foremost, holding my head downwards on my breast to keep it from
striking on the rock; then, after one cry to my Saviour, having let
myself down as far as possible by a branch, I at last let go, throwing
my arms forward and trying to keep my feet well up. A giddy swirl, as
if flying through the air, took possession of me; a few moments
seemed an age; I rushed quickly down, and felt no obstruction till my
feet struck into the sea below. Adoring and praising my dear Lord
Jesus, who had ordered it so, I regained my feet; it was low tide, I
had received no injury, I found my umbrella, and, wading through, I
found the shore path easier and lighter than the bush had been. The
very darkness was my safety, preventing the Natives from rambling
about. I saw no person to speak to, till I reached a village quite near
to my own house, fifteen or twenty miles from where I had started;
here I left the sea path and promised young men some fish-hooks to
guide me the nearest way through the bush to my Mission Station,
which they gladly and heartily did. I ran a narrow risk in
approaching them; they thought me an enemy, and I arrested their
muskets only by a loud cry,—
“I am Missi! Don’t shoot; my love to you, my friends!”
Praising God for His preserving care, I reached home, and had a
long refreshing sleep. The Natives, on hearing next day how I had
come all the way in the dark, exclaimed,—
“Surely any of us would have been killed! Your Jehovah God alone
thus protects you and brings you safely home.”
With all my heart, I said, “Yes! and He will be your protector and
helper too, if only you will obey and trust in Him.”
Certainly that night put my faith to the test. Had it not been the
assurance that I was engaged in His service, and that in every path of
duty He would carry me through or dispose of me therein for His
glory, I could never have undertaken either journey. St. Paul’s words
are true to-day and for ever,—“I can do all things through Christ
which strengtheneth me.”
CHAPTER IX.
DEEPENING SHADOWS.
Welcome Guests.—A Fiendish Deed.—The Plague of Measles.—A

Heroic Soul.—Horrors of Epidemic.—A Memorable New Year.
—A Missionary Attacked.—In the Valley of the Shadow.—Blow
from an Adze.—A Missionary’s Death.—Mrs. Johnston’s Letter.
—A Heavy Loss.—The Story of Kowia.—Kowia’s Soliloquy.—
The Passing of Kowia.—Mortality of Measles.—Fuel to the Fire.
—Hurricanes.—A Spate of Blood and Terror.—Nowar
Vacillates.—The Anger of the Gods.—Not Afraid to Die.—
Martyrs of Erromanga.—Visit to the Gordons.—Their
Martyrdom.—Vindication of the Gordons.—Gordon’s Last
Letter.—Plots of Murder.—Death by Nahak.—Nowar Halting
Again.—Old Abraham’s Prayer.—Miaki at the Mission House.—
Satanic Influences.—Perplexity Deepening.—Selwyn’s
Testimony.—Rotten Tracts.—Captain and Mate of Blue Bell.—
My Precious Dog.—Fishing Nets and Kawases.—The Taro
Plant.—The Kava Drink.—Katasian and the Club Scene.—The
Yams.—Sunshine and Shadow.—The Teachers Demoralized.—
The Chief’s Alphabet.—Our Evil Genius.—Ships of Fire Again.—
Commodore Seymour’s Visit.—Nouka and Queen ’Toria.—The
Dog to his Vomit Again.
In September, 1860, I had the very great pleasure of welcoming, as

fellow-labourers to Tanna, the Rev. S. F. Johnston and his wife, two
able and pious young Missionaries from Nova Scotia. Having visited
the whole group of the New Hebrides, they preferred to cast their lot
on Tanna. During the Rainy Season, and till they had acquired a little
of the language, and some preparation had been made of a Station
for themselves, I gladly received them as my guests. The company
was very sweet to me! I gave them about fourteen Tannese words to
be committed to memory every day, and conversed with them, using
the words already acquired; so that they made very rapid progress,
and almost immediately were of some service in the Mission work.
No man could have desired better companions in the ministry of the
Gospel.
About this time I had a never-to-be-forgotten illustration of the
infernal spirit that possessed some of the Traders towards these poor
Natives. One morning, three or four vessels entered our Harbour and
cast anchor off Port Resolution. The Captains called on me; and one
of them, with manifest delight, exclaimed,—
“We know how to bring down your proud Tannese now! We’ll
humble them before you!”
I answered, “Surely you don’t mean to attack and destroy these
poor people?”
He answered, not abashed but rejoicing, “We have sent the
measles to humble them! That kills them by the score! Four young
men have been landed at different ports, ill with measles, and these
will soon thin their ranks.”
Shocked above measure, I protested solemnly and denounced their
conduct and spirit, but my remonstrances only called forth the
shameless declaration,—
“Our watchword is,—Sweep these creatures away and let white
men occupy the soil!”
Their malice was further illustrated thus: they induced Kepuku, a
young Chief, to go off to one of their vessels, promising him a
present. He was the friend and chief supporter of Mr. Mathieson and
of his work. Having got him on board, they confined him in the hold
amongst Natives lying ill with measles. They gave him no food for
about four-and-twenty hours; and then, without the promised
present, they put him ashore far from his own home. Though weak
and excited, he scrambled back to his Tribe in great exhaustion and
terror. He informed the Missionary that they had put him down
amongst sick people, red and hot with fever, and that he feared their
sickness was upon him. I am ashamed to say that these Sandal-wood
and other Traders were our own degraded countrymen; and that they
deliberately gloried in thus destroying the poor Heathen. A more
fiendish spirit could scarcely be imagined, but most of them were
horrible drunkards, and their traffic of every kind amongst these
Islands was, generally speaking, steeped in human blood.
The measles, thus introduced, became amongst our islanders the
most deadly plague. It spread fearfully, and was accompanied by sore
throat and diarrhœa In some villages, man, woman, and child were
stricken, and none could give food or water to the rest. The misery,
suffering, and terror were unexampled, the living being afraid
sometimes even to bury the dead. Thirteen of my own Mission party
died of this disease; and, so terror-stricken were the few who
survived, that when the little Mission schooner John Knox returned
to Tanna, they all packed up and returned to their own Aneityum,
except my own dear old Abraham.
At first, thinking that all were on the wing, he also had packed his
things, and was standing beside the others ready to leave with them.
I drew near to him, and said,—
“Abraham, they are all going; are you also going to leave me here
alone on Tanna, to fight the battles of the Lord?”
He asked, “Missi, will you remain?”
I replied, “Yes; but, Abraham, the danger to life is now so great
that I dare not plead with you to remain, for we may both be slain.
Still, I cannot leave the Lord’s work now.”
The noble old Chief looked at the box and his bundles, and,
musing, said,—
“Missi, our danger is very great now.”
I answered, “Yes; I once thought you would not leave me alone to
it; but, as the vessel is going to your own land, I cannot ask you to
remain and face it with me!”
He again said, “Missi, would you like me to remain alone with you,
seeing my wife is dead and in her grave here?”
I replied, “Yes, I would like you to remain; but, considering the
circumstances in which we will be left alone, I cannot plead with you
to do so.”
He answered, “Then, Missi, I remain with you of my own free
choice, and with all my heart. We will live and die together in the
work of the Lord. I will never leave you while you are spared on
Tanna.”
So saying, and with a light that gave the foregleam of a martyr’s
glory to his dark face, he shouldered his box and bundles back to his
own house; and thereafter, Abraham was my dear companion and
constant friend, and my fellow-sufferer in all that remains still to be
related of our Mission life on Tanna.
Before this plague of measles was brought amongst us, Mr.
Johnston and I had sailed round in the John Knox to Black Beach on
the opposite side of Tanna and prepared the way for settling
Teachers there. And they were placed soon after by Mr. Copeland
and myself with encouraging hopes of success, and with the prospect
of erecting there a Station for Mr. and Mrs. Johnston. But this
dreadful imported epidemic blasted all our dreams. Mr. Johnston
and his wife devoted themselves, from the very first, and assisted me
in every way to alleviate the dread sufferings of the Natives. We
carried medicine, food, and even water, to the surrounding villages
every day, few of themselves being able to render us much assistance.
Nearly all who took our medicine and followed instructions as to
food, etc., recovered; but vast numbers of them would listen to no
counsels, and rushed into experiments which made the attack fatal
all around. When the trouble was at its height, for instance, they
would plunge into the sea, and seek relief; they found it in almost
instant death. Others would dig a hole into the earth, the length of
the body and about two feet deep; therein they laid themselves down,
the cold earth feeling agreeable to their fevered skins; and when the
earth around them grew heated, they got friends to dig a few inches
deeper, again and again, seeking a cooler and cooler couch. In this
ghastly effort many of them died, literally in their own graves, and
were buried where they lay! It need not be surprising, though we did
everything in our power to relieve and save them, that the Natives
associated us with the white men who had so dreadfully afflicted
them, and that their blind thirst for revenge did not draw fine
distinctions between the Traders and the Missionaries. Both were
whites—that was enough.
The 1st January, 1861, was a New Year’s Day ever to be
remembered. Mr. and Mrs. Johnston, Abraham and I, had spent
nearly the whole time in a kind of solemn yet happy festival. Anew in
a holy covenant before God, we unitedly consecrated our lives and
our all to the Lord Jesus, giving ourselves away to His blessed service
for the conversion of the Heathen on the New Hebrides. After
evening family worship, Mr. and Mrs. Johnston left my room to go to
their own house, only some ten feet distant; but he returned to
inform me that there were two men at the window, armed with huge
clubs, and having black painted faces. Going out to them and asking
them what they wanted, they replied,—
“Medicine for a sick boy.”
With difficulty, I persuaded them to come in and get it. At once, it
flashed upon me, from their agitation and their disguise of paint, that
they had come to murder us. Mr. Johnston had also accompanied us
into the house. Keeping my eye constantly fixed on them, I prepared
the medicine and offered it. They refused to receive it, and each man
grasped his killing stone. I faced them firmly and said,—
“You see that Mr. Johnston is now leaving, and you too must leave
this room for to-night. To-morrow, you can bring the boy or come for
the medicine.”
Seizing their clubs, as if for action, they showed unwillingness to
withdraw, but I walked deliberately forward and made as if to push
them out, when both turned and began to leave.
Mr. Johnston had gone in front of them and was safely out. But he
bent down to lift a little kitten that had escaped at the open door; and
at that moment one of the savages, jerking in behind, aimed a blow
with his huge club, in avoiding which Mr. Johnston fell with a
scream to the ground. Both men sprang towards him, but our two
faithful dogs ferociously leapt in their faces and saved his life.
Rushing out, but not fully aware of what had occurred, I saw Mr.
Johnston trying to raise himself, and heard him cry,—
“Take care! these men have tried to kill me, and they will kill you!”
Facing them sternly I demanded,—
“What is it that you want? He does not understand your language.
What do you want? Speak with me.”
Both men, thereon, raised their great clubs and made to strike me;
but quick as lightning these two dogs sprang at their faces and
baffled their blows. One dog was badly bruised, and the ground
received the other blow that would have launched me into Eternity.
The best dog was a little crossbred retriever, with terrier’s blood in
him, splendid for warning of the approaching dangers, and which
had already been the means of saving my life several times. Seeing
how matters stood, I now hounded both dogs furiously upon them
and the two savages fled. I shouted after them,—
“Remember, Jehovah God sees you and will punish you for trying
to murder His servants!”
In their flight, a large body of men, who had come eight or ten
miles to assist in the murder and plunder, came slipping here and
there from the bush and joined them fleeing too. Verily, “the wicked
flee, when no man pursueth.” David’s experience and assurance
came home to us, that evening, as very real:—“God is our refuge and
our strength ... therefore we will not fear.” But, after the danger was
all past, I had always a strange feeling of fear, more perhaps from the
thought that I had been on the verge of Eternity and so near the great
White Throne than from any slavish fear. During the crisis, I felt
generally calm, and firm of soul, standing erect and with my whole
weight on the promise, “Lo! I am with you alway.” Precious promise!
How often I adore Jesus for it, and rejoice in it! Blessed be His name.
I, now accustomed to such scenes on Tanna, retired to rest and
slept soundly; but my dear fellow-labourer, as I afterwards learned,
could not sleep for one moment. His pallor and excitement
continued next day, indeed for several days; and after that, though he
was naturally lively and cheerful, I never saw him smile again. He
told me next morning,—
“I can only keep saying to myself, Already on the verge of Eternity!
How have I spent my time? What good have I done? What zeal for
souls have I shown? Scarcely entered on the work of my life, and so
near death! O my friend, I never realized what death means, till last
night!” So saying, he covered his face with both hands, and left me to
hide himself in his own room. For that morning, 1st January, 1861,
the following entry was found in his Journal:—“To-day, with a heavy
heart and a feeling of dread, I know not why, I set out on my
accustomed wanderings amongst the sick. I hastened back to get the
Teacher and carry Mr. Paton to the scene of distress. I carried a
bucket of water in one hand and medicine in the other; and so we
spent a portion of this day endeavouring to alleviate their sufferings,
and our work had a happy effect also on the minds of others.” In
another entry, on 22nd December he wrote:—“Measles are making
fearful havoc amongst the poor Tannese. As we pass through the
villages, mournful scenes meet the eye; young and old prostrated on
the ground, showing all these painful symptoms which accompany
loathsome and malignant diseases. In some villages few are left able
to prepare food, or to carry drink to the suffering and dying. How
pitiful to see the sufferers destitute of every comfort, attention, and
remedy that would ameliorate their suffering or remove their
disease! As I think of the tender manner in which we are nursed in
sickness, the many remedies employed to give relief, with the
comforts and attention bestowed upon us, my heart sickens, and I
say, Oh my ingratitude and the ingratitude of Christian people! How
little we value our Christian birth, education, and privileges, etc.”
Having, as above recorded, consecrated our lives anew to God on
the first day of January, I was, up till the sixteenth of the month,
accompanied by Mr. Johnston and sometimes also by Mrs. Johnston
on my rounds in the villages amongst the sick, and they greatly
helped me. But by an unhappy accident, I was laid aside when most
sorely needed. When adzing a tree for house-building, I observed
that Mahanan the war Chief’s brother had been keeping too near me
and that he carried a tomahawk in his hand; and, in trying both to do
my work and to keep an eye on him, I struck my ankle severely with
the adze. He moved off quickly, saying,—“I did not do that,” but
doubtless rejoicing at what had happened. The bone was badly hurt,
and several of the blood-vessels cut. Dressing it as well as I could,
and keeping it constantly soaked in cold water, I had to exercise the
greatest care. In this condition amidst great sufferings, I was
sometimes carried to the villages to administer medicine to the sick,
and to plead and pray with the dying.
On such occasions, in this mode of transit even, the conversations
that I had with dear Mr. Johnston were most solemn and greatly
refreshing. He had, however, scarcely ever slept since the first of
January, and during the night of the sixteenth he sent for my bottle
of laudanum. Being severely attacked with ague and fever, I could
not go to him, but sent the bottle, specifying the proper quantity for a
dose, but that he quite understood already. He took a dose for
himself, and gave one also to his wife, as she too suffered from
sleeplessness. This he repeated three nights in succession, and both
of them obtained a long, sound, and refreshing sleep. He came to my
bedside, where I lay in the ague-fever, and said with great animation,
amongst other things,—
“I have had such a blessed sleep, and feel so refreshed! What
kindness in God to provide such remedies for suffering man!”
At mid-day his dear wife came to me crying,—
“Mr. Johnston has fallen asleep, so deep that I cannot awake him.”
My fever had reached the worst stage, but I struggled to my feet,
got to his bedside, and found him in a state of coma, with his teeth
fixed in tetanus. With great difficulty we succeeded in slightly
rousing him; with a knife, spoon, and pieces of wood, we forced his
teeth open, so as to administer an emetic with good effects, and also
other needful medicines. For twelve hours, we had to keep him
awake by repeated cold dash in his face, by ammonia, and by
vigorously moving him about. He then began to speak freely; and
next day he rose and walked about a little. For the two following
days, he was sometimes better and sometimes worse; but we
managed to keep him up till the morning of the 21st, when he again
fell into a state of coma from which we failed to rouse him. At two
o’clock in the afternoon, he fell asleep, another martyr for the
testimony of Jesus in those dark and trying Isles, leaving his young
wife in indescribable sorrow, which she strove to bear with Christian
resignation. Having made his coffin and dug his grave, we two alone
at sunset laid him to rest beside my own dear wife and child, close by
the Mission House.
In Mrs. Johnston’s account, in a letter to friends regarding his
death, she says:—
“Next morning, the 17th, he rose quite well. He slept well the night
before from having taken a dose of laudanum. He also gave some to
me, as I had been ill all the day, having slept little for two or three
nights.... Two men helped Mr. Paton to his bedside, as I found him
lying very low in fever, yet he waited on Mr. Johnston affectionately.
For some time, while he was in Mr. Paton’s hands, I could scarcely
keep myself up at all. We thought it was from the laudanum I had
taken. I had to throw myself down every few minutes.... For some
weeks after, I was almost constantly bedfast. I ate little; still I felt no
pain, but very stupid.... At times, we have services with the Natives.
For a week past, we have scarcely gone to bed without fears. One
night, our house was surrounded with crowds of armed men, ready
at any moment to break in upon us for our lives. We have had to sit
in the house for days past, with the doors locked, to prevent any of
the savages from entering; for every party seems to be united against
us now. The great sickness that prevails amongst them is the cause of
this rage. They say, we made the disease, and we must be killed for it;
that they never died off in this way before the religion came amongst
them, etc., etc.”
Mrs. Johnston recovered gradually, returned by the first
opportunity to Aneityum, and for nearly three years taught the girls’
School at Dr. Geddie’s Station. Thereafter she was married to my
dear friend the Rev. Joseph Copeland, and spent with him the
remainder of her life on Fotuna, working devotedly in the service of
the Mission, seeking the salvation of the Heathen.
The death of Mr. Johnston was a heavy loss. From his landing on
Tanna, he appeared to enjoy excellent health, and was always very
active, bright, and happy, till after that attack by the savages with
their clubs on New Year’s Day. From that night, he never again was
the same. He never admitted that he had got a blow, but I fear his
nervous system must have been unhinged by the shock and horror of
the scene. He was genuinely lamented by all who knew him. Our
intercourse on Tanna was very sweet, and I missed him exceedingly.
Not lost to me, however; only gone before!
Another tragedy followed, with, however, much of the light of
Heaven amid its blackness, in the story of Kowia, a Tannese Chief of
the highest rank. Going to Aneityum in youth, he had there become a
true Christian. He married an Aneityumese Christian woman, with
whom he lived very happily and had two beautiful children. Some
time before the measles reached our island, he returned to live with
me as a Teacher and to help forward our work on Tanna. He proved
himself to be a decided Christian; he was a real Chief amongst them,
dignified in his whole conduct, and every way a valuable helper to
me. Everything was tried by his own people to induce him to leave
me and to renounce the Worship, offering him every honour and
bribe in their power. Failing these, they threatened to take away all
his lands, and to deprive him of Chieftainship, but he answered,—
“Take all! I shall still stand by Missi and the Worship of Jehovah.”
From threats, they passed to galling insults, all which he bore
patiently for Jesu’s sake. But one day, a party of his people came and
sold some fowls, and an impudent fellow lifted them after they had
been bought and offered to sell them again to me. Kowia shouted,—
“Don’t purchase these, Missi; I have just bought them for you, and
paid for them!”
Thereon the fellow began to mock at him. Kowia, gazing round on
all present and then on me, rose like a lion awaking out of sleep, and
with flashing eyes exclaimed,—
“Missi, they think that because I am now a Christian I have
become a coward! a woman! to bear every abuse and insult they can
heap upon me. But I will show them for once that I am no coward,
that I am still their Chief, and that Christianity does not take away
but gives us courage and nerve.”
Springing at one man, he wrenched in a moment the mighty club
from his hands, and swinging it in air above his head like a toy, he
cried,—
“Come any of you, come all against your Chief! My Jehovah God
makes my heart and arms strong. He will help me in this battle as He
helps me in other things, for He inspires me to show you that
Christians are no cowards, though they are men of peace. Come on,
and you will yet know that I am Kowia your Chief.”
All fled as he approached them; and he cried,—
“Where are the cowards now?” and handed back to the warrior his
club. After this they left him at peace.
He lived at the Mission House, with his wife and children, and was
a great help and comfort to Abraham and myself. He was allowed to
go more freely and fearlessly amongst the people, than any of the rest
of our Mission staff. The ague and fever on me at Mr. Johnston’s
death, so increased and reduced me to such weakness that I had
become insensible, while Abraham and Kowia alone attended to me.
On returning to consciousness, I heard as in a dream Kowia
lamenting over me, and pleading that I might recover, so as to hear
and speak with him before he died. Opening my eyes and looking at
him, I heard him say,—
“Missi, all our Aneityumese are sick. Missi Johnston is dead. You
are very sick, and I am weak and dying. Alas, when I too am dead,
who will climb the trees and get you a cocoa-nut to drink? And who
will bathe your lips and brow?” Here he broke down into deep and
long weeping, and then resumed,—“Missi, the Tanna men hate us all
on account of the Worship of Jehovah; and I now fear He is going to
take away all His servants from this land, and leave my people to the
Evil One and his service!” I was too weak to speak, so he went on,
bursting into a soliloquy of prayer: “O Lord Jesus, Missi Johnston is
dead; Thou hast taken him away from this land. Missi Johnston the
woman and Missi Paton are very ill; I am sick, and Thy servants the
Aneityumese are all sick and dying. O Lord, our Father in Heaven,
art Thou going to take away all Thy servants, and Thy Worship from
this dark land? What meanest Thou to do, O Lord? The Tannese hate
Thee and Thy Worship and Thy servants, but surely, O Lord, Thou
canst not forsake Tanna and leave our people to die in the darkness!
Oh, make the hearts of this people soft to Thy Word and sweet to Thy
Worship; teach them to fear and love Jesus; and oh, restore and
spare Missi, dear Missi Paton, that Tanna may be saved!”
Touched to the very fountains of my life by such prayers, from a
man once a Cannibal, I began under the breath of God’s blessing to
revive.
A few days thereafter, Kowia came again to me, and rousing me
out of sleep, cried,—
“Missi, I am very weak; I am dying. I come to bid you farewell, and
go away to die. I am nearing death now, and I will soon see Jesus.”
I spoke what words of consolation and cheer I could muster, but he
answered.—
“Missi, since you became ill my dear wife and children are dead
and buried. Most of our Aneityumese are dead, and I am dying. If I
remain on the hill, and die here at the Mission House, there are none
left to help Abraham to carry me down to the grave where my wife
and children are laid. I wish to lie beside them, that we may rise
together in the Great Day when Jesus comes. I am happy, looking
unto Jesus! One thing only deeply grieves me now; I fear God is
taking us all away from Tanna, and will leave my poor people dark
and benighted as before, for they hate Jesus and the Worship of
Jehovah. O Missi, pray for them, and pray for me once more before I
go!”
He knelt down at my side, and we prayed for each other and for
Tanna. I then urged him to remain at the Mission House, but he
replied,—
“O Missi, you do not know how near to death I am! I am just going,
and will soon be with Jesus, and see my wife and children now.
While a little strength is left, I will lean on Abraham’s arm, and go
down to the graves of my dear ones and fall asleep there, and
Abraham will dig a quiet bed and lay me beside them. Farewell,
Missi, I am very near death now; we will meet again in Jesus and
with Jesus!”
With many tears he dragged himself away; and my heart-strings
seemed all tied round that noble simple soul, and felt like breaking
one by one as he left me there on my bed of fever all alone. Abraham
sustained him, tottering to the place of graves; there he lay down,
and immediately gave up the ghost and slept in Jesus; and there the
faithful Abraham buried him beside his wife and children. Thus died
a man who had been a cannibal Chief, but by the grace of God and
the love of Jesus changed, transfigured into a character of light and
beauty. What think ye of this, ye scoffers at Missions? What think ye
of this, ye sceptics as to the reality of conversion? He died, as he had
lived since Jesus came to his heart; without a fear as to death, with
an ever-brightening assurance as to salvation and glory through the
blood of the Lamb of God, that blood which had cleansed him from
all his sins, and had delivered him from their power. I lost, in losing
him, one of my best friends and most courageous helpers; but I
knew, that day, and I know now, that there is one soul at least from
Tanna to sing the glories of Jesus in Heaven—and, oh, the rapture
when I meet him there!
Before leaving this terrible plague of measles, I may record my
belief that it swept away, with the accompanying sore throat and
diarrhœa, a third of the entire population of Tanna; nay, in certain
localities more than a third perished. The living declared themselves
unable to bury the dead, and great want and suffering ensued. The
Teacher and his wife and child, placed by us at Black Beach, were
also taken away; and his companion, the other Teacher there,
embraced the first opportunity to leave along with his wife for his
own island, else his life would have been taken in revenge. Yet, from
all accounts afterwards received, I do not think the measles were
more fatal on Tanna than on the other Islands of the group. They
appear to have carried off even a larger proportion on Aniwa, the
future scene of my many sorrows but of greater triumphs.
A new incentive was added to the already cruel superstitions of the
Natives. The Sandal-wooders, our degraded fellow-countrymen, in
order to divert attention from themselves, stirred the Natives with
the wild faith that the Missionaries and the Worship had brought all
this sickness, and that our lives should be taken in revenge. Some
Captains, on calling with their ships, made a pretence of refusing to
trade with the Natives as long as I was permitted to live on the
island. One Trader offered to come on shore and live amongst the
Tannese, and supply them with tobacco and powder, and caps and
balls, on condition that the Missionary and Abraham were got out of
the way! He knew that these were their greatest wants, and that they
eagerly desired these things, but he refused to make any sales to
them, till we were murdered or driven away. This was fuel to their
savage hate, and drove them mad with revenge, and added countless
troubles to our lot.
Hurricane and tempest also fought against us at that time. On the
3rd, and again on the 10th March, 1861, we had severe and
destructive storms. They tore up and smashed bread-fruit, chestnut,
cocoa-nut, and all kinds of fruit trees. The ground was strewn thick
with half-ripe and wasted fruits. Yam plantations and bananas were
riven to pieces, and fences and houses lay piled in a common ruin.
My Mission House was also greatly injured; and the Church, on
which I had spent many weeks of labour, was nearly levelled with the
ground. Trees of forty years’ growth were broken like straws, or lifted
by the roots and blown away. At the other Station, all Mr.
Mathieson’s premises except one bedroom were swept off in the
breath of the hurricane. The sea rose alarmingly and its waves rolled
far inland, causing terrible destruction. Had not the merciful Lord
left one bedroom at my Station and one at Mr. Mathieson’s partly
habitable, I know not what in the circumstances we could have done.
Men of fifty years declared that never such a tempest had shaken
their Islands. Canoes were shivered on the coral rocks, and Villages
were left with nothing but ruins to mark where they had been.
Though rain poured in torrents, I had to keep near my fallen house
for hours and hours to prevent the Natives from carrying away
everything I had in this world; and after the second storm, all my
earthly belongings had to be secured in the one still-standing room.
Following upon this came another spate of thirst for our blood,
which was increased in the following manner. Miaki the war Chief
had an infant son, who had just died. They told us that four men
were slain at the same time, that their spirits might serve and
accompany him in the other world; and that our death also was again
resolved upon. For four days they surrounded our diminished
premises. We locked ourselves all up in that single bedroom, and
armed savages kept prowling about to take our lives. What but the
restraining pity of the Lord kept them from breaking in upon us?
They killed our fowls. They cut down and destroyed all our
remaining bananas. They broke down the fence around the
plantation, and tried to burn it, but failed. They speared and killed
some of the few goats—my sole supply of milk. We were helpless, and
kept breathing out our souls in prayer; and God did preserve us, but,
oh, what a trying time!
The horror grew, when shortly thereafter we learned that our
people near the Harbour had killed four men and presented their
bodies to certain Chiefs who feasted on them; and that they in return
had given large fat hogs to our people, one for each of ten bodies
which our people had formerly presented to them. Within a few
months, thirteen or fourteen persons, nearly all refugees or prisoners
of war, were reported to us as killed and feasted upon. We generally
heard nothing of these murders till all was over, but in any case, I
would have been helpless against their bloodthirst, even had I
exposed myself to their savage enmity. They sent two dead bodies to
our nearest village, where still we conducted Worship every Sabbath
when we durst appear amongst them; but our people refused to
receive them, saying, “Now we know that it is wrong to kill and eat
our fellow-creatures.” A Chief from another village, being present,
eagerly received them and carried them off to a great feast for which
he was preparing.
At this juncture, our friendly Chief Nowar seemed to become
afraid. His life also had been threatened; and our life had been often
attempted of late. Society around was all in turmoil, and Nowar
urged us all to leave and take refuge in Aneityum till these dangers
blew past, and he himself would accompany us. I refused, however,

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Indian Literature and the World:

Multilingualism, Translation, and the

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Transnationalizing the Public Sphere 1st Edition Nancy

Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere J.

Intermedial Performance and Politics in the Public

Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online

Civic Learning Democratic Citizenship and the Public

Philosophy and Political Engagement: Reflection in the

Literature and the Public Good Rylance

ISBN 978-1-137-54549-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54550-3 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Cultura RM/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Introduction: Indian Literature and the World 1

Part I Comparing Multilingual Perspectives

Pre-Nation and Post-Colony: 1947 in Qurratulain

Reading Together: Hindi, Urdu, and English Village Novels 61

Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s

Part II Enlarging the World Literary Canon: New Voices

A Multiple Addressivity: Indian Subaltern Autobiographies

The Modern Tamil Novel: Changing Identities

The Voices of Krishna Sobti in the Polyphonic Canon

Part III Globalized Indian Public Spheres

Resisting Slow Violence: Writing, Activism,

The Novel and the North-East: Indigenous Narratives

From Nation to World: Bombay/Mumbai Fictions

The Individual and the Collective in Contemporary India:

‘Home is a Place You’ve Never Been to’: A Woman’s Place

Rossella Ciocca and Neelam Srivastava

In what follows, we propose a working model of contemporary Indian

© The Author(s) 2017 1

BEYOND THE POSTCOLONIAL

is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of

This book is our counterargument to Rushdie’s statement. Given India’s

THE QUESTION OF MULTILINGUALISM IN INDIA

Indians moved within a multilingual structure, not necessarily thinking of

cultural unity of the country’ (Sahitya Akademi 2016). And in its

INDIAN LITERATURE: COMPARATIVISM THROUGH TRANSLATION

or national context, never achieving an effective life as world literature’

impatient of national identity. Translation ﬂourishes by virtue of that

linguistic communities is fostered. Translations between regional lan-

RETHINKING WORLD LITERATURE

literature’s hegemony in the literary criticism of contemporary texts,

international, one that today might champion an internationalist litera-

This mode of disappearance of literatures of the Global South in the literary

This internationalist literature consisted of ‘journalism, treatises, and

But there is another story to translation, and especially English as a

Such an internationalist view of Indian literature takes into account

INDIAN LITERATURE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

of new media like the Internet in the emergence of a globalized post-

backwardness and political subjugation, so that it may help us to under-

aptitudes, habits of thought and feeling, and pieces of knowledge, formed

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

the focus on these autobiographies, Srivastava examines some trends in

THE DANGEROUS LANDING THROUGH THE SURF.

My heart rose to the Lord in trembling prayer! The wave came

Welcome Guests.—A Fiendish Deed.—The Plague of Measles.—A

In September, 1860, I had the very great pleasure of welcoming, as

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