Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2202971
Nobonita Rakshit, R. Gaur
Abstract Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists, to trace the socio-political, economic and ecological injustices of post-colonial disasters like the Bhopal gas leak. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People bears witness to such accounts and recreates the night of December 2–3, 1984, through the testimonies of the people surviving the gas disaster. This article identifies Sinha’s narrative technique as ‘eco-testimony’, which strategically revives hitherto undocumented survivor testimonies and their experiences of eco-social exploitation in the post-disaster environment and forges a voice of dissent against the uneven, attritional and necropolitical violence of multinational companies and their chief ally, the neocolonial nation-state.
{"title":"Post-Colonial Disasters and Narratives of Erasure: Reimagining Testimonies of Toxic Encounter","authors":"Nobonita Rakshit, R. Gaur","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2202971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2202971","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists, to trace the socio-political, economic and ecological injustices of post-colonial disasters like the Bhopal gas leak. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People bears witness to such accounts and recreates the night of December 2–3, 1984, through the testimonies of the people surviving the gas disaster. This article identifies Sinha’s narrative technique as ‘eco-testimony’, which strategically revives hitherto undocumented survivor testimonies and their experiences of eco-social exploitation in the post-disaster environment and forges a voice of dissent against the uneven, attritional and necropolitical violence of multinational companies and their chief ally, the neocolonial nation-state.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42552831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2204013
M. Raianu
Abstract This article discusses the relationship between political subjectivity and urban space in three novels written in the immediate aftermath of the Partition of India: Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided and Yashpal’s This Is Not That Dawn. Despite extensive thematic and structural similarities, these early Partition novels have never been considered together and through a historical lens. Each narrative features moments of reckoning when the young protagonists are faced with sudden demands to become political in a new way, for example by abandoning secular anti-colonialism for communitarianism. The diversity of their experiences and responses, from bitter resignation to open-ended struggle, reflects the difficulties of constructing unitary selves expressing deep interior convictions aligned with collective identities. These transformations of political subjectivities are situated in and shaped by the heterogeneous urban spaces of Lucknow and Lahore, which establish the conditions of possibility for coexistence and its limits.
{"title":"Being Young, Becoming Political: Subjectivity and Urban Space in Early Partition Novels","authors":"M. Raianu","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2204013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2204013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article discusses the relationship between political subjectivity and urban space in three novels written in the immediate aftermath of the Partition of India: Qurratulain Hyder’s My Temples, Too, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz’s The Heart Divided and Yashpal’s This Is Not That Dawn. Despite extensive thematic and structural similarities, these early Partition novels have never been considered together and through a historical lens. Each narrative features moments of reckoning when the young protagonists are faced with sudden demands to become political in a new way, for example by abandoning secular anti-colonialism for communitarianism. The diversity of their experiences and responses, from bitter resignation to open-ended struggle, reflects the difficulties of constructing unitary selves expressing deep interior convictions aligned with collective identities. These transformations of political subjectivities are situated in and shaped by the heterogeneous urban spaces of Lucknow and Lahore, which establish the conditions of possibility for coexistence and its limits.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46015194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2200085
S. Ismail
Abstract The Deobandi-Barelvi conflict in South Asia is conventionally over religious beliefs and practices. However, it also has an earlier dimension, encompassing the early nineteenth century theological debate between Shah Ismail and Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi. Deobandi and Barelvi polemicists rewrite this history to establish their own tradition and identity within a particular narrative of the past, linked to the family of Shah Waliullah. The Barelvis portray their founder, Ahmed Raza Khan, as belonging to the tradition of both Waliullah and Khairabadi, and against Ismail, while the Deobandis highlight Ismail’s orthodoxy. In doing so, polemicists rewrite the past and ensure that the dimension of history is a significant aspect of their conflict today as distinct oppositional identities are created.
{"title":"Writing History in Deobandi-Barelvi Polemics: Conflicting Views of Shah Ismail and Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi","authors":"S. Ismail","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2200085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2200085","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Deobandi-Barelvi conflict in South Asia is conventionally over religious beliefs and practices. However, it also has an earlier dimension, encompassing the early nineteenth century theological debate between Shah Ismail and Fazl-e-Haq Khairabadi. Deobandi and Barelvi polemicists rewrite this history to establish their own tradition and identity within a particular narrative of the past, linked to the family of Shah Waliullah. The Barelvis portray their founder, Ahmed Raza Khan, as belonging to the tradition of both Waliullah and Khairabadi, and against Ismail, while the Deobandis highlight Ismail’s orthodoxy. In doing so, polemicists rewrite the past and ensure that the dimension of history is a significant aspect of their conflict today as distinct oppositional identities are created.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45082700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2208444
Thomas Cowan
Even before Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable, the study of the cinema in Pakistan owed much to the work of Iftikhar Dadi. Cinephiles, budding researchers and students of this once long-neglected field could look to Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi’s Urdu Film Series (1994/ 2009). Made up of photographs of television screens broadcasting Urdu-language Pakistani films, the series depicted the mutual exchanges between cultural memory and electronic media. One could also look to Iftikhar Dadi’s work as a curator and writer on contemporary art in his 2012 edited volume, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (with Hammad Nasar), or his influential role in the Lahore Biennale, and the artistic productions and collaborations this work documented and inspired. Then, one could turn to his writing on Pakistani film which, until the present book, appeared in important volumes on contemporary Pakistan or pioneering journals on screen studies in South Asia. As his first book-length foray into the subject, Dadi’s focus is Urdu-language films made in Pakistan between 1956 and 1969, a time he calls the ‘long sixties’. This roughly correlated with the rule of Ayub Khan, whose military rule ushered in a period of both industrial and infrastructural stability and political and social upheaval. In an earlier study of Pakistani films from a similar era, Dadi warned against mapping the relations between cinema and society, a relationship he called neither ‘mimetic nor reflective’. Wisely eschewing this foundational assumption that animates many global film histories, Lahore Cinema ends up being a very idiosyncratic text, an exercise in multi-scale comparison that looks not to linear trajectories of production and reception but to repertoires that emerge from, return to, or cling to the city of Lahore. There is an implicit qualitative difference that Dadi appears to be making between so-called Lollywood cinema, as both a space of industrial production
{"title":"Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable","authors":"Thomas Cowan","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2208444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2208444","url":null,"abstract":"Even before Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable, the study of the cinema in Pakistan owed much to the work of Iftikhar Dadi. Cinephiles, budding researchers and students of this once long-neglected field could look to Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi’s Urdu Film Series (1994/ 2009). Made up of photographs of television screens broadcasting Urdu-language Pakistani films, the series depicted the mutual exchanges between cultural memory and electronic media. One could also look to Iftikhar Dadi’s work as a curator and writer on contemporary art in his 2012 edited volume, Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (with Hammad Nasar), or his influential role in the Lahore Biennale, and the artistic productions and collaborations this work documented and inspired. Then, one could turn to his writing on Pakistani film which, until the present book, appeared in important volumes on contemporary Pakistan or pioneering journals on screen studies in South Asia. As his first book-length foray into the subject, Dadi’s focus is Urdu-language films made in Pakistan between 1956 and 1969, a time he calls the ‘long sixties’. This roughly correlated with the rule of Ayub Khan, whose military rule ushered in a period of both industrial and infrastructural stability and political and social upheaval. In an earlier study of Pakistani films from a similar era, Dadi warned against mapping the relations between cinema and society, a relationship he called neither ‘mimetic nor reflective’. Wisely eschewing this foundational assumption that animates many global film histories, Lahore Cinema ends up being a very idiosyncratic text, an exercise in multi-scale comparison that looks not to linear trajectories of production and reception but to repertoires that emerge from, return to, or cling to the city of Lahore. There is an implicit qualitative difference that Dadi appears to be making between so-called Lollywood cinema, as both a space of industrial production","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48857515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2195250
Shailaja Paik
Abstract Critiques of vulgarity, sexuality and class featured prominently in the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence India. This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi (banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses how it became a particularly unique index of heightened transgressive pleasure. I situate this discourse within a larger public debate, where dominant caste middle-class elites took upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant dominated castes and low-class masses towards decency, civilized action and citizenship. Many elites energetically worked on their ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation. Drawing upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts, I show how elites policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing and paradoxically harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran (creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi identity as modern, moral and decent.
{"title":"‘To Kiss or Not to Kiss?’ Cinema, Vulgarity and Marathi Manus in 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra","authors":"Shailaja Paik","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2195250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2195250","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Critiques of vulgarity, sexuality and class featured prominently in the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence India. This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi (banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses how it became a particularly unique index of heightened transgressive pleasure. I situate this discourse within a larger public debate, where dominant caste middle-class elites took upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant dominated castes and low-class masses towards decency, civilized action and citizenship. Many elites energetically worked on their ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation. Drawing upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts, I show how elites policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing and paradoxically harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran (creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi identity as modern, moral and decent.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45620411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2197337
M. Andersen
Abstract This article is about territorial claims, authority and rights in an urban settlement or ‘bosti’ in central Dhaka. It highlights the drama of a violent encounter between a police officer and a young man, unfolding how the social ordering of urban space is (re)produced in and through authority and violence. It illustrates how situated practices of authority define who can access institutions of rights and justice, and who cannot. It concludes that claims for rights and remedies are not easy to act out when the collusion of state and non-state authority negate voice and agency and leave negotiation and equitable justice reserved for those recognised within a structure of resolution, illuminating how intimacies of violence interlink with wider political configurations and economic conditions.
{"title":"Authority Traversed: Police, Politics and the Urban Poor in Dhaka","authors":"M. Andersen","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2197337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2197337","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article is about territorial claims, authority and rights in an urban settlement or ‘bosti’ in central Dhaka. It highlights the drama of a violent encounter between a police officer and a young man, unfolding how the social ordering of urban space is (re)produced in and through authority and violence. It illustrates how situated practices of authority define who can access institutions of rights and justice, and who cannot. It concludes that claims for rights and remedies are not easy to act out when the collusion of state and non-state authority negate voice and agency and leave negotiation and equitable justice reserved for those recognised within a structure of resolution, illuminating how intimacies of violence interlink with wider political configurations and economic conditions.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46800452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2204615
Devika Shankar
Abstract This paper examines how the annexation of Malabar by the English East India Company in the last decade of the eighteenth century allowed the colonial administration to experiment with novel forms of state control in the region’s forests. At the same time, through a focus on the connections forged between Malabar’s forests and Bombay’s dockyards, this paper will use archival sources to examine the crucial role played by the timber monopoly introduced in 1806 in dislodging Malabar and its ports from their central position in the Indian Ocean economy and facilitating their incorporation into the margins of the emerging colonial economy.
{"title":"A Forest of Ships: Malabar’s State Forests and Bombay’s Dockyards, 1795–1822","authors":"Devika Shankar","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2204615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2204615","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper examines how the annexation of Malabar by the English East India Company in the last decade of the eighteenth century allowed the colonial administration to experiment with novel forms of state control in the region’s forests. At the same time, through a focus on the connections forged between Malabar’s forests and Bombay’s dockyards, this paper will use archival sources to examine the crucial role played by the timber monopoly introduced in 1806 in dislodging Malabar and its ports from their central position in the Indian Ocean economy and facilitating their incorporation into the margins of the emerging colonial economy.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41494437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2193922
R. Khan
Abstract The article explores the genealogies of Muslim cultural and Urdu language reform in late nineteenth century colonial India and traces its post-colonial trajectories in contemporary public culture in Pakistan. It does so by analysing the language and gender politics of Urdu in two Pakistani TV dramas, Aangan Terha (Crooked Courtyard), written by Anwar Maqsood and screened on the government-run Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) channel in 1984, and Quddusi Sahab ki Bewah (The Widow of Mr. Quddusi), scripted by Faseeh Bari Khan, which was telecast on ARY Digital, a global private satellite channel, in 2012. The article emphasises the gendered language and performative politics of Urdu and respectability in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.
摘要:本文探讨了19世纪末殖民时期印度穆斯林文化和乌尔都语改革的谱系，并追溯了其在巴基斯坦当代公共文化中的后殖民轨迹。它通过分析两部巴基斯坦电视剧中乌尔都语的语言和性别政治来实现这一目标，一部是安瓦尔·马克苏德(Anwar Maqsood)编剧的《扭曲的庭院》(Aangan Terha)， 1984年在政府运营的巴基斯坦电视公司(PTV)频道播出，另一部是由法西·巴里·汗(Faseeh Bari Khan)编剧的《古杜西先生的遗孀》(Quddusi Sahab ki Bewah)， 2012年在全球私人卫星频道ARY Digital上播出。文章强调了乌尔都语的性别语言和表演政治，以及殖民和后殖民时期南亚的尊重。
{"title":"Muslim Household, Nation and Urdu in Television Dramas of Pakistan","authors":"R. Khan","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2193922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2193922","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The article explores the genealogies of Muslim cultural and Urdu language reform in late nineteenth century colonial India and traces its post-colonial trajectories in contemporary public culture in Pakistan. It does so by analysing the language and gender politics of Urdu in two Pakistani TV dramas, Aangan Terha (Crooked Courtyard), written by Anwar Maqsood and screened on the government-run Pakistan Television Corporation (PTV) channel in 1984, and Quddusi Sahab ki Bewah (The Widow of Mr. Quddusi), scripted by Faseeh Bari Khan, which was telecast on ARY Digital, a global private satellite channel, in 2012. The article emphasises the gendered language and performative politics of Urdu and respectability in colonial and post-colonial South Asia.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48533391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2200501
Diti Bhattacharya, R. Mason
Abstract This article examines two cities of discordant colonial heritage in India—Chandernagore, a former French colony in West Bengal, and Panjim, a former Portuguese territory in Goa—to demonstrate how these cities experience their colonial identities through heritage spaces. It explores the ways in which the museums and public spaces of these cities use memory and materiality to perform discordant colonial pasts which differ from the dominant narrative of the British Raj. Conceptualising discordance as a framework to trace the unique ways in which the museums and public heritage sites of these two cities mobilise their French and Portuguese colonial heritage, the article shows how these discordant colonial cities distinguish themselves from the British Raj and its legacies. The article affirms these differences not in terms of a duality, but a continual process of convergence and divergence that is mutually constitutive of heritage practices in the cities.
{"title":"From Discordance to Assemblages: Renegotiating French and Portuguese Colonial Identities through Indian Tourism and Heritage Sites","authors":"Diti Bhattacharya, R. Mason","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2200501","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2200501","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines two cities of discordant colonial heritage in India—Chandernagore, a former French colony in West Bengal, and Panjim, a former Portuguese territory in Goa—to demonstrate how these cities experience their colonial identities through heritage spaces. It explores the ways in which the museums and public spaces of these cities use memory and materiality to perform discordant colonial pasts which differ from the dominant narrative of the British Raj. Conceptualising discordance as a framework to trace the unique ways in which the museums and public heritage sites of these two cities mobilise their French and Portuguese colonial heritage, the article shows how these discordant colonial cities distinguish themselves from the British Raj and its legacies. The article affirms these differences not in terms of a duality, but a continual process of convergence and divergence that is mutually constitutive of heritage practices in the cities.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44807205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2023.2207311
Navaneetha Mokkil
Paradoxes abound in this sentence, which provides an intriguing entry point to the key impulses of Akshya Saxena’s Vernacular English. This book posits English as a vernacular and purposefully moves the language away from a singular embeddedness in the coercive history of colonialism. Saxena takes the reader through a wideranging array of texts and sites to think ‘language again—not at its limits but in its proliferation with bodies, media and languages’ (21). The book puts forward a practice of reading that makes us attentive to the energies that shape English as a sensory field in India. There is a stark difference in the approach to English here from earlier postcolonial articulations of disjuncture. As I was reading the book, I was reminded of Jamaica Kincaid’s fictional depiction of a post-colonial subject’s animosity and rage when she sees daffodils for the first time because of its associations with the estranging poetry of Wordsworth, which was part of her education under the shadow of the empire. Such impassioned binaries do not shape the life-world that Saxena maps as she deftly demonstrates how the story of English in India ‘cannot simply be the story of oppression’ (180). Saxena’s narrative of English is also replete with sensory dynamics, but she makes us traverse the multivalent and contested trajectories of the language. While language is often conceptualised via practices of reading and comprehension, this book explores the ways in which the life of a language exceeds the domains of the pedagogic. From the home to the street, cinema screens to slogans, debates on poetry to a temple for the Dalit Goddess of English, there is a multisensory field that the book assembles in order to trace the quotidian and contested textures of English in India. Chapter 4 begins with an anecdote about the author’s pedagogic encounter with English as a child. She received her earliest lessons in the English language from her mother, who is in no way comfortable with inhabiting the skin of the language, though she does have functional competency. Yet this scene where a mother passes on not a familiar or familial tongue, but one that is marked by a ‘distressing foreignness’ (126) is not cast as a moment of loss, violence or failure. Rather the author’s attempt is to demonstrate the many manifestations of English in India that make it a malleable tool in the hands of many stuttering speakers. The five chapters of the book are organised around the rubrics of ‘Law’, ‘Touch’, ‘Text’, ‘Sound’ and ‘Sight’. Chapter 1 examines how English functions as a language of bureaucracy and governance in post-colonial India and becomes integral to the nation-state by giving democracy its ‘form of address’ (36). Chapter 2 analyses how Dalit literature in English and Hindi and the mobilisation of English in Dalit intellectual and political history
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